A Prescription for Thrift: what would yours be?

It costs $60000 per minute for a supplier to stop a General Motors production line, a figure that makes the costs of book production seem laughable. Car manufacturers work to much tighter ‘just in time’ deadlines, and every minute wasted is a dollar lost. But soon one in Michigan will be stopped for two weeks, because there are no sales, and therefore no work. Who’d have thought that Americans would stop buying cars not because of Kyoto but because of lack of credit? Then yesterday I, along with several thousand other savers, watched as various Icelandic banks into which I, sensibly I thought, stuffed my savings, teetered, and eventually fell, into bankruptcy. Today, who knows; if we could predict what was next then we would be making money rather than losing it…

Apparently the effect on the publishing industry is already being felt and some of it is positive. The ‘how-to’ guide and the billionaire bonkbusters are the winners so far; it seems that in hard times we like reading about the superrich. Reading for solace or succour is nothing new; indeed at the moment there are even bibliotherapists at the rather grandly named School of Life, ‘a very small shop with very big ambitions’, which promises to ‘take exceptional care and effort to create a reading prescription that’s perfect for you’ (a standard consultation costs £35). But the Bloomsbury shop’s experts, who include Alain de Botton and Robert McFarlane, weren’t the first: GPs have been using bibliotherapy as a treatment for mild depression for the past few years with some success; in the US one of the most successful forms of treatment for depression is a book, as Alan Yentob found out when investigating whether self-help really did, well, help.

I’m not sure that a few sessions with Alain de Botton could do much for our failing banking system but, unlike the economy and the economists, most of us are not beyond bibliotherapy. For a start, compared to a cinema ticket in London, a £7.99 paperback is still a bargain, since, if loved, it provides several hours, or even years in the rereading, of pleasure. Having scoured my shelves at work and at home I came up with three suitable books for this current climate: two practical and one pleasurable.

The Impoverished Gastronome is, according to the author, a book about ‘Mean Cuisine’. Having been sacked from his job, David Chater rode around London on a bike asking top chefs for three-course dinner recipes, to feed six people for £10. The book was published in 1996 and I’ve no idea what the equivalent of a ’96 tenner is (anyone?) but it still makes interesting reading. Some of HC’s authors, like Richard Corrigan are in there as are still famous names like Fergus Henderson and Bruce Poole, several famous restaurants and lots of inspiration. In the days of lavish full-colour and TV cookery books, this plain text-only B-format paperback looks strangely unassuming but somehow it seems more in line with the sense of the 1970s that encroaches everyday.

My second is Love Is Not Enough, a guide written specifically for women to help them understand finance. Much of the early chapters on saving and investing no longer feel very helpful but the last section is still pertinent. The author examines our notions of happiness and criticises the misplaced notion that it can be found in stuff. Since none of us will be able to afford much soon, that is if anything is still produced, it seems cheering to remember this. She also offers 53 money-saving tips which range from the obvious (drink less coffee out, stop going to the gym, cook from scratch) to the less so/more amusing: get all your condoms free from family-planning clinics; buy your bike at bumblebeeauctions.co.uk (after all, you won’t be able to afford petrol let alone a car…) and keep your weight constant (if you don’t change size you don’t need to change your clothes).

My final prescription is for a novel, for my favourite life-affirming, light at the end of a tunnel book: The Shipping News. If Quoyle can survive his various depressions and disasters on the bleak Newfoundland coast then so can we all…

But what would you prescribe? The solace of great writing, the specificity of self-help or Standard and Poor’s…?