Book Clubs by The Numbers

Hi Carol,

Very good question! Absolutely men are in book clubs but I didn't feel that the numbers we had responding to the survey were sufficient for robust reporting of results so felt it best to focus just on the women. I have no empirical data on this but, based on years of interviewing book clubs (you can read these in our book club section) I get the impression that while some groups are all women and actively want to stay that way, others are open to having men - just haven't had any join, while others are happily mixed.

Then there are some all male book clubs - we've interviewed a few over the years - but they may not take a form of the "traditional" group sitting in the living room. For example, a friend's father has commuted the same route for many years and gets together on the train with a bunch of friends and they talk books. From what I was told it sounded like the discussion was pretty structured - agreeing books, discussing them - but when I suggested to my friend that it would be great to interview her father she said that she didn't think that would be a good idea as she didn't think that he really thought of it as a club as such!

Continuing on this train of thought - a considerable number of people, both men and women, belong to non traditional groups. In the survey we asked those who said they belonged to a book club that did not meet in person how their group met.

The answers were fascinating - ranging from people meeting online in clubs that in essence mimic a traditional club - such as BookBrowse's book club - to people who were very active in sites such as paperback book swaps - to people who chat with their family regularly about books. Although some of these felt to me to be stretching the definition of a book club too far for the purposes of reporting stats in the infographic (and thus were excluded) the point is that the people involved were talking about books regularly in a environment in which they felt they belonged - which sounds pretty much like a book club to me!

Very best

Davina (BB Editor)