Anyone remember the hubbub around this time last year when Barack Obama was outed as an elitist? As I recall, he said something about rednecks and Hillary jumped on a bandwagon and good ol’ John just stood on his soapbox saying “Gee whiz, I am a redneck!” Something like that, anyway.

Well, according to the latest research, in Britain anyone who reads is an elitist. Seriously, that’s what it boils down to (or reduces, to use fancy chef talk). As Benedicte Page reports in the Bookseller, HarperCollins, the National Year of Reading Campaign and the Publishers Association did some investigations together and found that around 20 million British people, a third of the population, are intimidated by the book trade. In many families reading is perceived to be alien and unattractive, a hobby for “people who don’t know how to live”. Head of NYR Honor Fletcher-Wilson commented that “intentionally or otherwise, a lot of people involved in the book world are conveying the impression that reading is associated with a particular area of society and lifestyle.” And her double-barrelled surname doesn’t add to that impression in any way. Booksellers are also to blame, for categorising their wares in difficult ways.

The good news is that in the C2DE group (manual and retail workers, I think, although it’s hard to track down an exact description on the net. Maybe the categories are intended to obfuscate? Oops, another elitist word) twenty per cent of parents are now reading to their children, up five per cent from 2007. Publicity, folks! That’s what it’s all about…