I’m currently reading a used copy of George Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia”, in a UK-produced edition. I’ve looked at it a couple times to see how much it originally cost, and the only thing I can find is the cryptic and seemingly nonsensical notation “3’6”. It’s in the upper corner of the cover, so I presume it must be the price.
Now, I’ve been trying to figure out for days what this stands for and I can’t make heads or tails of it. I originally thought it meant £3.60, but that seems awfully steep for a paperback published in the mid-60s. Any Brits on the board care to help stamp out a bit of ignorance on this side of the pond?
The bizzare thing is that there is an entire political party (Tory) in the UK dedicated to preventing metrication any further inroads. when you look at how crazy the pounds, shillings and pence system was, and how much easier a decimal £1=100p system is, you wonder why people have so great an attachment to lbs and oz…
>> how crazy the pounds, shillings and pence system was
To tell the truth, I knew it and felt nostalgic when they changed. It’s like everything: if that’s what you grew up with, it was ingrained in you and seemed like the most natural thing in the world.
There have been previous threads explaining the old system. there was more than the basic pounds/shillings/pence. There was the half crown worth 2’6" , the guinea worth 21 shillings…
people tend to not want change. yes the American system of measures is crazy… but no one wants to be the generation that suffered through the change.
It’s always been my contention that the old system was superior to the decimal one in many ways. (The change came when I was eight years old… believe me, that’s old enough to understand money). 240 (the number of old pence to the pound) has more prime factors than 100, thus is evenly divisible in more ways. Obvious example; try dividing both of them by three; 100/3 = 33.3 recurring, 240/3 = 80 (or six shillings and eightpence).
Of course, it means you have to remember your twelve-times table, and be prepared to do much other simple arithmetic in your head… is this a bad thing?
(And, if the system confused a few blasted foreigners as well, that’s an added bonus, isn’t it? ;))
I’ve checked a few other paperback books of that era, both British and American, and it appears that the price of a paperback was about 2’ in 1950, but had increased to about 3’6 in 1965 in the U.K., while in the U.S. the price of a book increased from around .35 to around .95 over the same period. I don’t remember the exact currency conversion rates during that period, but I think that the conversion rate started at $4 to a pound and dropped to about $2.40 to a pound during that period.
2’ would be 10 pence in decimal British currency and 3’6 would be 17.5 pence in decimal British currency. If you used the 4 to a pound conversion rate, the price of a paperback rose from about .40 to about $.70 during that period. If you used the 2.40 to a pound conversion rate, the price of a paperback increased from about .24 to about $.42 during that period. So it appears that paperback books were cheaper in the U.K. than in the U.S. during most of that period, and that’s certainly not true today. Books are 20% to 40% more expensive in the U.K. than in the U.S. at the moment.
Definitely true, Wendell, but a lot of that is due to price-fixing agreements in the publishing and distribution industry. The Net Book Agreement, IIRC, is the culprit, and a few retailers have indicated that they plan to challenge it or ignore it in the very near future.
Even more bizarre is that the party in power always tends to support moves toward fuller metrication (and fuller membership in the European Union, for that matter), and the opposition always seem to, er, well, oppose it, but when the other party gets elected, they swap views.
>> Even more bizarre is that the party in power always tends to support moves toward fuller metrication (and fuller membership in the European Union, for that matter), and the opposition always seem to, er, well, oppose it, but when the other party gets elected, they swap views.
Oh my goodness!! You mean all brits are not true gentlemen as we are led to believe? You mean politicians there are just like politicians everywhere else? What is the world coming to? ::Sailor hangs his head in despair::
>> going digital? I thought it was going decimal
Er… yeah… whatever… what’s the difference?
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Don’t answer, I’m joking. I can see you were getting ready to answer
As far as the pre-decimalisation symbols for pounds, shillings, and pence went, the pound was the stylised L-with-a slash (don’t have it on my keyboard, so I copied it out of an earlier post: £), the shilling was a tick symbol, ', like that used for the foot.
Did they use a double tick symbol " (like that for inches) for pence? I thought pence were d. I’ve seen old prices written similarly to 3’/- (three shillings, no pence) so I guess that a price with all three sunits would be written like £1 4’ 5d but not like £6 3’ 4"…
Of course, after decimalisation, the pence symbol went from d to p.
Wasn’t there an HG Wells book, ‘When The Sleeper Wakes’, where they used a base-12 monetary system? Makes me wonder what duodecimal SI would look like…
I have some paperbacks from the 60s and they are all equally priced at 3’6 . I guess that was the short form but I remember seeing things like 3s 6d, 3/6, 3’/6d etc
Of course another advantage in having decimal currency and units of measurement is that it is much easier to use an electronic calculator. I would hate to think of the complications with these devices if we still had pounds, shillings and pence. On the subject of the old rates of exchange :- when there were 4 dollars to the pound the nickname for 5 shillings was “dollar”.
This is all from my having lived pre-decimal (specially for Sailor: pre-digital!)
We had to learn the 12 times table at school, to cope with 12 pence in a shilling (and 12 inches in a foot)
I think the farthing (quarter penny) was going out when I was a kid. We also had the halfpenny and the threepenny bit (that was a yellow coin with flat edges - an octagon?), as well as the sixpence and the half-crown (that was 2 shillings and sixpence). I don’t remember the crown, but some posh transactions took place in guineas (that was, I think, one pound plus one shilling).
After the above, decimalisation came as a great relief.
I trust Steve Wright was joking when he said he preferred the old system. For example, to divide a old pound into 3 shares meant two (!) calculations - first 240 / 3 = 80, then 80 / 12 = 6 + 8 remainder, so the answer is 6 shillings and 8 pence.
I wrote 3/6 at school to mean 3 shillings and 6 pence.
3’ meant 3 feet (just as 6" meant 6 inches). So 3’6" is a length. d meant pence (don’t ask me why!).
I won’t ask you, I’ll tell you! It is from Latin “denarium” just like poud is L for Libra.
No, guineas were not used for fancy stuff, they were used to make things sound a bit cheaper: Only 99 guineas really means “overpriced at 104 pounds”.
I still remember the half crowns (2/6), the threepenny bits (pronounced thrupenny), the sixpences, and have a very vague recollection of hearing as a toddler a "heypenny"for half a penny. And, boy, those penny coins were huge and had effigies of kings who had lived long before my time. Those pennies had been circulating for ever! Ahh, the memories. I think we should go back to those times…
Hey - this is turning into Britsh money nostalgia hour! Oh, yes, I remember thrupennies etc. It was real money in those days! I still have some around - for when I am really ancient and need my memory jogged.
Little American kids in the 1960s learned about British money from the Mary Poppins film. And would have had no idea what “tuppence” meant if not for the camera showing two pennies in Michael Banks’s outstretched palm. (Incidentally, that film which I saw at the impressionable age of 5 put me off bankers for life when the mean greedy old bankers grabbed the pennies out of the kid’s hand).
I can pinpoint the exchange rate circa 1968: it was £1=$2.40 and hence a penny=a penny. That seemed so logical and perfect, a penny here equaling a penny there, that I couldn’t imagine it ever being different. I got this intelligence from the American edition of Ian Fleming’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang; the American publishers inserted an afterword explaining pounds, shillings, & pence, and that the exchange rate was $2.40.
