Famous authors' houses

[Maggie Ann]

Either authors were paid better or houses were cheaper back then.

This is one of those click-click-click links on Yahoo, designed to serve up the maximum number of ads to see a few photos, so hopefully it still works.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/14-famous-authors-houses-worth-120000866.html

I think houses were cheaper back then. 

[cecilia_writer]

George Orwell's house is probably just as cheap today (relatively).

[Post-Doctorate D]

I think houses were cheaper back then. 

For comparison, I checked out book prices.

The closest I could find was that books in 1901 cost between $0.10 and $0.98 each.

In today's dollars, that would mean books would cost between $2.97 and $29.06 each.

However, I haven't found anything more specific, such as fiction or non-fiction or word counts, so it may not be a proper comparison.

My guess is that people back then might have been willing to pay more for books than they do today.

On the flip side, a newspaper in 1901 cost a penny which would be thirty cents in today's dollars.  My local paper charges a dollar, so they are way overpricing themselves, plus offering less value than a newspaper in 1901 would have, so it's not surprising newspapers are struggling these days.

Then again, if a newspaper can charge a buck for content that's available free online and can probably be read during breakfast, we should be able to charge ten bucks for our books that provide more than a half hour of reading pleasure and aren't available for free online.

After all, ten bucks today is only thirty-four cents in 1901 dollars.

[Shoe]

This is interesting if not entirely relevant (from CPI Inflation Calculator):

"...$10,000 in 1900 is equivalent in purchasing power to $300,045.24 in 2018, a difference of $290,045.24 over 118 years."

[Maggie Ann]

Back when I first started working, the rule of thumb was rent/mortgage = one week's salary. Then it went up to 1.5 weeks salary and then 2 weeks salary. The drop in interest rates over the last few years might have improved things a bit.

[Tom Wood]

Only Mark Twain's house has any whimsy to it. Most are staid, and Orwell's is downright grim.

[Writer]

Looks like Edith Wharton and Agatha Christie liked elegance, while Robert Frost went for simplicity and Orwell for isolation. I think Hemingway's Key West house looks the most relaxing.

[Reveries]

A lot of the houses seem to be where authors were born rather than houses they bought themselves, so the scale of the houses suggests that people from wealthy families were more likely to become authors. Or perhaps the real truth is that fancier houses were more likely to survive until the present day. Anything demolished would be unlikely to appear in that list.

[JRTomlin]

George Orwell's house is probably just as cheap today (relatively).

Of course, it depends, relatively, on what you are comparing them with. If you compare it with London prices it is less, but I'm not at all sure I would use the term 'cheap'. This 3 bedroom historic house on the Isle of Jura is fairly reasonably priced at £345,000. (About 440,000 US) It is tempting.

https://www.onthemarket.com/details/6170542/?utm_source=mitula&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=mitula_feed

[CoraBuhlert]

A lot of the houses seem to be where authors were born rather than houses they bought themselves, so the scale of the houses suggests that people from wealthy families were more likely to become authors. Or perhaps the real truth is that fancier houses were more likely to survive until the present day. Anything demolished would be unlikely to appear in that list.

Also, e.g. for Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, that's a very nice house and would have been a very nice house in 1749, when he was born there, but I bet you it what is was worth in 1749 is much less than it would be worth today.

Besides, for authors born before WWII, a wealthy family background was even more important than today, because higher education usually wasn't accessible to the poor and neither was the leisure needed to write. So authors often came from the wealthy and educated middle classes or above. The homes reflect this.   

[cecilia_writer]

George Orwell's house is probably just as cheap today (relatively).

Of course, it depends, relatively, on what you are comparing them with. If you compare it with London prices it is less, but I'm not at all sure I would use the term 'cheap'. This 3 bedroom historic house on the Isle of Jura is fairly reasonably priced at £345,000. (About 440,000 US) It is tempting.

https://www.onthemarket.com/details/6170542/?utm_source=mitula&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=mitula_feed

Very nice. I could certainly use a separate library!

[JRTomlin]

For me, it was the stag that sold it.