Christian Century: Our book budget - money spent on books, gambling and charitable contributions

On my desk awaiting review is a pile of new books. The prices for these books are (give or take a nickel) $30, $35, $25, $65 and $20.1 wish they cost less; many of them will be bought by ministers on modest budgets, graduate students, young parents of young children who have to count every penny and Christians who are good stewards and not always sure how much to spend on themselves. (Good stewards buy good books as part of their stewardship.)

At times readers complain about our choice of books to review. Why not concentrate on cheaper ones? According to annual reports in Publishers Weekly, our selections are priced right on the average. Why not review only paperbacks? Because many of them are reprints noticed a year or so ago when new in hardbound. And have you noticed what paperbacks cost? Here's a sheaf of them on my shelf: $13, $19, $21, $17, $25. Still not cheap.

According to the Association of American Publishers, sales of religious books rose 5.3 percent last year, reaching $955.5 million. All book sales climbed 6 percent last year, the AAP reported. The total? (Remember, we are talking about all books: cook-text-, encyclopedia, adult, juvenile, hardcover, paperback, dirty, clean.) Sales came to $18,039,800,000. Call it $18 billion.

But let's see where America's heart really lies. From U.S. News and World Report (March 14) we learn that in 1992 Americans spent $330 billion on legalized gambling. That figure does not include the numbers rackets, underground gambling, the friendly office pool, etc. While book sales have been increasing by a percentage point or so some years and decreasing by the same amount in others, money spent on legalized gambling, which now occurs in all states except Utah and Hawaii, has jumped since 1976 by 1,800 percent.

My crude figuring suggests that this means Americans spend about $18 on legalized gambling for every $1 they spend for books. While you are shelling out the amount for those books mentioned in the first paragraph, your legally gambling neighbor is spending $540, $630, $450, $1,170 and $360.

The Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches 1993 reports the good news that the year before, church members gave $3,222,753,233 to benevolences. That includes all church members' giving for all benevolences - for world poverty, immigration, the aged, the homeless, seminarians and anyone else covered in the "for outside purposes" part of your church envelope. Since we gamble $904,000,000 per day, that means that all churchly benevolences for the year approximately match the dollars spent gambling in three and a half days, say, from any one Sunday to any Wednesday noon. It means that Americans gambled away on one day about what they spent for religious books in the whole year.

The local papers recently interviewed some retirees who were gambling on Mississippi River casino boats; they came from a blue-collar town near mine. One was asked about extravagances for pensioneers and others on fixed incomes. He answered that his circle of friends goes only every six months or so and "me and the old lady only lose about five or six hundred each weekend, about average for our group.- (Someone always wins; they come back.) No priest can elicit 1 percent of that amount for the parish offerings any weekend. Time for a sermon: "These be your Gods, America!" And a prayer: please don't complain about the price of books mentioned in our pages.