Someone who photographed my work area might manage to get six books into the picture, one a coffee-table book brought out so that I could sign some papers on it

Someone who photographed my work area might manage to get six books into the picture, one a coffee-table book brought out so that I could sign some papers on it out on the porch. I have more than six books, and coffee-table books do not make up a large fraction. St. Jerome presumably had more than ten books. Knowing the Aeneid well may have been all that one needed to get out of Eton or Harrow in the 18th Century. But if you look at what the literate actually read, they read a good deal. The founders of the US read a fair bit of Roman, Greek, and English history.