Due to the nature of literary texts as being composed of words rather than numbers, they are not an obvious choice to serve as data for statistical analyses. However, with the help of computational tech- niques, words can be converted to numerical data and certain parts of a text can be examined on a large scale. Textual elements such as sentence length, word length and lexical diversity, which are associated by scholars on the one hand with the writing style of an individual author and on the other with the complexity of a text and the intended age of its readers, can thus be subjected to statistical evaluation. In this paper, data from little under 700 English and Dutch books written for di昀昀erent ages is analysed using a statistical linear mixed model. The results show that the textual elements studied are better quali昀椀ed to detect the age of the intended reader of a text than the identity or age of the author.