Taxing questions

Taxes inevitably express, however crudely, some system of social values or order of priorities. Our reaction to the possibility of a tax on books springs from our gut feeling that “books are different” and not taxing them, even when as a nation we're supposed to be looking at every penny, is somehow a sign of a superior civilisation. That feeling helped to prevent VAT's fore‐runner, purchase tax, being slapped on books in 1940 in order to help pay for a rather large war. Having tax free books gave me the retort obvious to a French colleague joyfully grumbling at our Puritan tax on that incontestable glory of Gallic culture — the wines of France from the Grands Crus to the Lesser Languedocs: we, unlike the French, did not tax that stimulant of the mind, the book.