It’s the London Book Fair and my esteemed publisher, Peter Dougherty of Princeton University Press, is in town. Among the many interesting things I learned from him over lunch yesterday is that economists are the most avid writers and readers of books.

This certainly seems consistent with the surge of interest in ‘pop’ economics (about which I and others wrote for the September 2012 ‘Economics Made Fun’ issue of the Journal of Economic Methodology). There are lots of good and lots of accessible (overlapping but not identical sets) economics books around. Of course, the state of the economy at present generates its own interest.

And the least-read academic genre? Literary criticism of course – a discipline which has moved as far away from ‘pop’, accessible and the joy of reading as it’s possible to get.

London Book Fair