I’d love to know the answer to this question. What is the average? Do men buy more than women? The fans of which genre buy the most? I can take a guess at the last question perhaps – it has to be comic book fans. Scifi hubby has just made a list of all then hardback graphic novels that he knows are coming out this year and that he wants to pre-order. There’s 56 of them.

I’m sure I should be annoyed about this number but I find books much easier to cope with than the rest of the collection. Partly because if you were to ever look at my Amazon account you would see quite how many books I get through in a year. The only thing that irks me is that he doesn’t read them all! I’d love to know what percentage he has actually read. some are even still in their cellophane…

Also keep in mind that this is just what he plans to buy and doesn’t count the impulse purchases, paperbacks, the comics themselves or the oversized, special edition, foil cover, limited edition, costs six times what it should book that he will inevitably find at some point this year.

Last year THE book was a limited edition, oversized hardback of the Walking Dead with a red foil cover. It was only available at New York Comic Convention and in limited numbers. Day one of the con saw us in the scrum to get two copies of the book – one for him and one for his scifi friend Mat. Having achieved that we then dragged these beomoths of books around with us until we found Tony Moore (the artist for the comics) and got him to sign them. Unfortunately he wasn’t sketching but he was friendly and signed one book ‘to Scifi hubby’ and one ‘to Mat’.

Two days later we took the books to be signed by Robert Kirkman. Just getting to see him was a challenge as he was only signing for forty people each day. Luckily our new scifi convention friends Jo and Jen helped us out (thanks guys!) and we had our 60 seconds with the ‘big man’. He signed both books, one ‘to Scifi hubby’ and one ‘to Mat’. Have you guessed the ending yet? Of course Kirkman signed them the wrong way round, so the books were signed ‘To Mat and To Scifi hubby’ and ‘To Scifi hubby and To Mat’. Oops! Scifi hubby had a complete melt down when he realised. Child like feet stamping, pouting bottom lip and “The books aren’t worth anything. I might as well just out them straight in the bin” was the gist of it.

In the end I took the books off him, fluttered my eyelashes at the ‘bouncers’ guarding the queue and got back to see Kirkman again. He was really nice about it, covered the mistakes with drawings of zombies and then signed the books the right way round. Queue total turn around from Scifi hubby when he realised he had something that no one else had. The irony is Kirkman is the writer not the artist so they aren’t the best zombies in the world, but I was definitely the best wife that day!