The thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people

George Orwell the bookseller. Here is his 1936 essay, Bookshop Memories.

Many things remain the same, some seventy years later, though his prediction that "The combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller out of existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman" was sadly off the mark (though he was closer to the truth with regard to used bookshops).

Modern books for children are rather horrible things, especially when you see them in the mass. Personally I would sooner give a child a copy of Petrenius Arbiter than Peter Pan, but even Barrie seems manly and wholesome compared with some of his later imitators.

Then there is this.

It is therefore worth noting that of all the authors in our library the one who 'went out' the best was - Priestley? Hemingway? Walpole? Wodehouse? No, Ethel M. Dell, with Warwick Deeping a good second and Jeffrey Farnol, I should say, third. Dell's novels, of course, are read solely by women, but by women of all kinds and ages and not, as one might expect, merely by wistful spinsters and the fat wives of tobacconists. It is not true that men don't read novels, but it is true that there are whole branches of fiction that they avoid. Roughly speaking, what one might call the average novel - the ordinary, good-bad, Galsworthy-and-water stuff which is the norm of the English novel - seems to exist only for women. Men read either the novels it is possible to respect, or detective stories. But their consumption of detective stories is terrific.

Here is the background on these now forgotten best sellers via links to Wikipedia. Ethel M. Dell, Warwick Deeping, and Jeffrey Farnol. Romance writers all. The dynamics of who is remembered and who forgotten are fascinating.