Who killed the dad book?

Or at least they used to.

According to The Wall Street Journal, sales of “serious non-fiction” are declining, with print sales down 8% last year. And who do publishing executives blame? Podcasts.

The world war two dad is one of the defining male archetypes of the modern West. Or at least since about 1994. One of my favourite stand-up comics, John Mulaney, once theorised that all dads are secretly training for a quiz show, and one day we’ll turn on the television and discover our fathers winning enormous sums of money on Normandy trivia.

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My sister and I used to find the family Sky recordings mysteriously clogged up with half-watched documentaries like World War Two in Colour or Rise of the Nazis that had been vaguely absorbed by our dad while eating toast.

I briefly interned on the books desk of the Financial Times, and a large part of my job involved trawling through the enormous catalogues publishers sent over about upcoming releases. I remember thinking I had effectively solved Christmas forever. “Bingo,” I thought. “That’s everyone sorted.”

But alas, I was wrong. When I took a copy of a book (they were free to take – I promise!) about the Spanish civil war home to my dad for his birthday, months later it remained unopened. In fact, it joined the ever-growing pile of books I’ve bought him about history and politics in the last few years. Because now he listens to podcasts instead.

The modern dad no longer signals seriousness with a massive Churchill biography left strategically on the coffee table. Instead, seriousness is conveyed conversationally: “I was listening to The Rest Is History and apparently…”

Dad expertise has become portable, and I suppose that makes sense. Where dad books required commitment, Dad podcasts suit the modern obsession with optimisation: why merely learn about the collapse of Yugoslavia when you could also be fixing the shed at the same time?

Younger generations with their screen addictions are often blamed (as we are for everything) on declining book sale numbers. But, in my experience, you are now far more likely to see someone in their twenties reading on the Tube than someone middle-aged.

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Granted, what they are often reading is essentially repackaged fan fiction. Or books carried partly for performative reasons in the hope of attracting a member of the opposite sex: the Gen Z performative male, as the joke goes, always has to have a copy of feminist literature tucked conspicuously under his arm.

Perhaps the truth is simply that dad stereotypes themselves are changing. Time is an ever-moving thing after all. Search “UK Dad Music” on Spotify and you’ll find playlists full of Arctic Monkeys, Oasis and Blur. How old does that make you feel, dear reader? 

Likewise, the stereotypical sitcom father used to be a stiff-upper-lip conservative type. The modern “centrist dad” stereotype is Brompton bike-riding, Have I Got News For You-watching and The Rest Is History-listening.

(And considering that constituency probably makes up a fair proportion of the readership of this magazine, I should say that I like them very much indeed.)

So perhaps the physical dad book is dying. But at least the replacement still involves people becoming improbably knowledgeable about Nuremberg. The dads still want to flex their historical expertise, they just now have a far more parasocial relationship with Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook.