Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

PRIVATE READING
t is summer. Sunk deep in the soft bed among feather pillows, with the inconstant rumble of carts on
the cobble-stones outside the window in the Rue de l’Hospice in the grey village of Saint-Sauveur-en-
Puisaye, an eight-year-old girl is silently reading Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. She doesn’t read many
books; she rereads the same ones over and over again. She loves Les Misérables with what she’ll later
call “a reasoning passion”; she feels she can nestle in its pages “like a dog in its kennel”. Every night, she
longs to follow Jean Valjean on his agonizing peregrinations, meet Cosette again, meet Marius, even the
dreaded Javert. (In fact the only character she can’t abide is the excruciatingly heroic little Gavroche.)
Outside in the back garden, among the potted trees and flowers, she has to compete for reading-matter
with her father, a military man who lost his left leg during the Italian campaigns. On the way to the
library (his private precinct) he picks up his newspaper — Le Temps — and his magazine — La Nature —
and, “his Cossack eye glittering under a grey hemp brow, swipes off the tables any printed material which
will then follow him to the library and never again see the light of day”. Through experience, the girl has
learned to keep her books out of his reach.
Her mother does not believe in fiction: “So many complications, so much passionate love in those novels,”
she tells her daughter. “In real life, people have other things on their minds. You be the judge: have you
ever heard me whinge and whine about love as people do in those books? And yet I’d have a right to a
chapter myself, I’d say! I’ve had two husbands and four children!” If she finds her daughter reading the
Catechism for her upcoming communion, she becomes immediately incensed: “Oh, how I hate this nasty
habit of asking questions! ‘What is God?’ ‘What is this?’ ‘What is that?’ These question marks, this
obsessive probing, this inquisitiveness, I find it all so terribly indiscreet! And all this bossing about, I ask
you! Who translated the Ten Commandments into this awful gibberish? Oh, I certainly don’t like seeing a
book like this in the hands of a child!”
Challenged by her father, lovingly watched over by her mother, the girl finds her only refuge in her room,
in her bed, at night. Throughout her adult life, Colette would seek out this solitary reading-space. Either
en ménage or alone, in small courtyard lodgings or in large country villas, in rented bed-sitters or in
ample Paris apartments, she would set aside (not always successfully) an area in which the only intrusions
would be those she invited herself. Now, stretched out in the muffled bed, holding the treasured book in
both hands and propping it up on her stomach, she has established not only her own space but her own
measure of time. (She doesn’t know it, but less than three hours away, in the Abbey of Fontevrault, Queen
Eleanor of Aquitaine, who died in 1204, lies sculpted in stone on the lid of her tomb, holding a book in
exactly the same manner.)
Reading throughout eternity: the tomb of Eleanor of Aquitaine. (photo credit 10.1)
I too read in bed. In the long succession of beds in which I spent the nights of my childhood, in strange
hotel rooms where the lights of passing cars swept eerily across the ceiling, in houses whose smells and
sounds were unfamiliar to me, in summer cottages sticky with sea spray or where the mountain air was so
dry that a steaming basin of eucalyptus water was placed by my side to help me breathe, the combination
of bed and book granted me a sort of home which I knew I could go back to, night after night, under
whichever skies. No one would call out and ask me to do this or that; my body needed nothing, immobile
under the sheets. What took place, took place in the book, and I was the story’s teller. Life happened
because I turned the pages. I don’t think I can remember a greater comprehensive joy than that of
coming to the few last pages and setting the book down, so that the end would not take place until at
least tomorrow, and sinking back into my pillow with the sense of having actually stopped time.
I knew that not every book was suitable for reading in bed. Detective stories and tales of the supernatural
were most likely to grant me a peaceful sleep. For Colette, Les Misérables, with its streets and forests,
flights down dark sewers and across battling barricades, was the perfect book for the quiet of the
bedroom. W.H. Auden agreed. He suggested that the book one reads should somehow be at odds with the
place in which it’s read. “I can’t read Jefferies on the Wiltshire Downs,” he complained, “nor browse on
limericks in a smoking-room.” This may be true; there may be a sense of redundancy in exploring on the

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page a world similar to the one surrounding us at the very moment of reading. I think of André Gide
reading Boileau as he was being ferried down the Congo, and the counterpoint between the lush,
disorderly vegetation and the chiselled, formal seventeenth-century verse seems exactly right.
But, as Colette discovered, not only do certain books demand a contrast between their contents and their
surroundings; some books seem to demand particular positions for reading, postures of the reader’s body
that in turn require reading-places appropriate to those postures. (For instance, she wasn’t able to read
Michelet’s Histoire de France until she found herself curled up in her father’s armchair with Fanchette,
“that most intelligent of cats”.) Often the pleasure derived from reading largely depends on the bodily
comfort of the reader.
“I have sought for happiness everywhere,” confessed Thomas à Kempis, early in the fifteenth century,
“but I have found it nowhere except in a little corner with a little book.” But which little corner? And
which little book? Whether we first choose the book and then an appropriate corner, or first find the
corner and then decide what book will suit the corner’s mood, there is no doubt that the act of reading in
time requires a corresponding act of reading in place, and the relationship between the two acts is
inextricable. There are books I read in armchairs, and there are books I read at desks; there are books I
read in subways, on streetcars and on buses. I find that books read in trains have something of the quality
of books read in armchairs, perhaps because in both I can easily abstract myself from my surroundings.
“The best time for reading a good stylish story,” said the English novelist Alan Sillitoe, “is in fact when
one is on a train travelling alone. With strangers roundabout, and unfamiliar scenery passing by the
window (at which you glance now and again) the endearing and convoluted life coming out of the pages
possesses its own peculiar and imprinting effects.” Books read in a public library never have the same
flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen. In 1374, King Edward III paid £66 13s 4d for a book of
romances “to be kept in his bedchamber”, where he obviously thought such a book should be read. In the
twelfth-century Life of Saint Gregory, the toilet is described as “a retiring place where tablets can be read
without interruption”. Henry Miller agreed: “All my good reading was done in the toilet,” he once
confessed. “There are passages of Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet — if one wants to extract
the full flavor of their content.” In fact, the little room “destined for a more special and more vulgar use”
was for Marcel Proust a place “for all my occupations which required an inviolable solitude: reading,
reverie, tears and sensual pleasure”.
The epicurean Omar Khayyam recommended reading verse outdoors under a bough; centuries later, the
punctilious Sainte-Beuve advised reading the Memoirs of Mme de Staël “under November’s trees”. “My
custom,” wrote Shelley, “is to undress, and sit on the rocks, reading Herodotus, until the perspiration has
subsided.” But not everyone is capable of reading under an open sky. “I seldom read on beaches or in
gardens,” confessed Marguerite Duras. “You can’t read by two lights at once, the light of day and the
light of the book. You should read by electric light, the room in shadow, and only the page lit up.”
One can transform a place by reading in it. During the summer holidays, Proust would sneak back into
the dining-room once the rest of the family had left on its morning walk, confident that his only
companions, “very respectful of reading”, would be “the painted plates hung on the wall, the calendar
where yesterday’s page had been freshly torn away, the clock and the hearth, who speak without
expecting an answer and whose babble, unlike human words, does not attempt to replace the sense of the
words you are reading with another, different sense”. Two full hours of bliss before the cook would
appear, “far too early, to lay the table; and if at least she had laid it without speaking! But she felt obliged
to say, ‘You can’t be comfortable like that; and if I brought you a desk?’ And just by having to answer, ‘No,
thank you very much,’ one was forced to come to a full stop and bring back from far away one’s voice,
which, hidden behind the lips, repeated soundlessly, and very fast, all the words read by the eyes; one had
to bring one’s voice to a halt, bring it into the open and, in order to say properly, ‘No, thank you very
much,’ give it an everyday appearance, an answering intonation which it had lost.” Only much later — at
night, well after dinner — and when there were but a few pages of the book left to read, would he relight
his candle, risking punishment if discovered, and insomnia, because once the book was finished, the
passion with which he had followed the plot and its heroes would make it impossible for him to sleep, and
he’d pace the room or lie breathlessly, wishing for the story to continue, or wishing to know at least
something more about the characters he had loved so well.
Towards the end of his life, imprisoned in a cork-lined room that gave him some respite from his asthma,
propped up in a cushioned bed and working under the light of a weak lamp, Proust wrote, “True books
should be born not of bright daylight and friendly conversation, but of gloom and silence.” In bed at night,
the page lit by a dim yellow glow, I, Proust’s reader, re-enact that mysterious moment of birth.
Geoffrey Chaucer — or rather, his insomniac lady in The Book of the Duchesse — considered reading in
bed a better entertainment than a board-game:
So when I saw I might not slepe,
Til now late, this other night,
Upon my bedde I sat upright,

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And bad oon reche me a book,
A romaunce, and he hit me took
To rede and dryve the night away;
For me thoghte it better play
Then playe[n] either at chesse or tables.
But there is something other than entertainment which one derives from reading in bed: a particular
quality of privacy. Reading in bed is a self-centred act, immobile, free from ordinary social conventions,
invisible to the world, and one that, because it takes place between the sheets, in the realm of lust and
sinful idleness, has something of the thrill of things forbidden. Perhaps it is the memory of those
nocturnal readings that lends the detective novels of John Dickson Carr, of Michael Innes, of Anthony
Gilbert — all read during summer holidays in my adolescence — a certain erotic colouring. The casual
phrase “taking a book to bed” has always seemed to me laden with sensual anticipation.
The novelist Josef Skvorecky has described his reading as a boy in Communist Czechoslovakia “in a
society governed by rather strict and binding rules where disobedience was punished in the good old pre-
Spockian way. One such rule: light in your bedroom must be switched off at nine sharp. Boys have to get
up at seven and they need ten hours of sleep every night.” Reading in bed became then the forbidden
thing. After the lights were switched off, Skvorecky says, “cuddled in my bed, I covered myself, head
inclusive, with a blanket, from under the mattress I fished out an electric torch, and then indulged in the
pleasures of reading, reading, reading. Eventually, often after midnight, I fell asleep from very
pleasurable exhaustion.”
The writer Annie Dillard remembers how the books of her American childhood led her away from her
Midwestern town “so I could fashion a life among books somewhere else.… And so we run to our
bedrooms and read in a fever, and love the big hardwood trees outside the windows, and the terrible
Midwest summers, and the terrible Midwest winters.” Reading in bed both closes and opens the world
around us.
The notion of reading in bed is not an ancient one. The Greek bed, the kline, was a wooden frame set on
turned, rectangular or animal-shaped legs and decorated with precious ornaments, and not really
practical for reading. During social gatherings, only men and courtesans were allowed to use it. It had a
low head-rest but no footboard, a mattress and pillows, and was employed both for sleeping and for
reclining at leisure. In this position, it was possible to read a scroll by holding one end with the left hand,
unrolling the other end with the right hand while the right elbow supported the body. But the procedure,
cumbersome at the best of times, became frankly uncomfortable after a short while, and ultimately
unbearable.
The Romans had a different bed (lectus) for each of several different purposes, including beds for reading
and writing. The forms of these beds did not vary much; the legs were turned, and most were decorated
with inlay and bronze mounts. In the darkness of the bedroom (in the cubiculum, usually in the farthest
corner of the house) the Roman sleeping-bed would sometimes serve as a not very congenial reading-bed;
by the light of a candle made from wax-soaked cloth, the lucubrum, the Romans would read and
“lucubrate” in relative quiet. Trimalchio, the parvenu of Petronius’s Satyricon, is brought into the banquet
room “supported by piles of miniature cushions” on a bed which serves several functions. Boasting that
he’s not one to look down on learning — he has two libraries, “one Greek and the other Latin” — he offers
to compose a few impromptu lines of verse which he then reads to the assembled guests: both
Trimalchio’s writing and the reading are performed while lying on the same ostentatious lectus.
The Roman nobleman portrayed on the inside wall of his sarcophagus would have read his scrolls in this
reclining position. (photo credit 10.2)
In the early years of Christian Europe, and well into the twelfth century, ordinary beds were simple,
disposable objects, often left behind during the forced retreats from war and famine. Since only the rich
had elaborate beds, and few but the rich had books, ornate beds and books became symbols of the
family’s wealth. Eustathius Boilas, a Byzantine aristocrat of the eleventh century, left in his will a bible,
several books of hagiography and history, a Dream Key, a copy of the popular Romance of Alexander and a
gilded bed.
Monks had plain cots in their cells, and there they could read in a little more comfort than that provided
by their hard benches and desks. An illuminated manuscript of the thirteenth century shows a young,
bearded monk on his cot, dressed in his habit, a white pillow behind his back and his legs wrapped up in a
grey blanket. The curtain separating his bed from the rest of the room has been hitched up. On a trestle

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table are three open books, and three more lie on top of his legs, ready for consultation, while in his
hands he holds a double wax tablet and a stylus. Apparently he has sought refuge in bed from the cold;
his boots are sitting on a painted bench and he is working on his reading in seemingly happy quietude.
A monk sits reading in his bed on a cold winter’s night, in an illuminated thirteenth-century French
manuscript. (photo credit 10.3)
In the fourteenth century, books passed from the exclusive hands of the nobility and the clergy to those of
the bourgeoisie. The aristocracy became the model for the nouveaux riches: if the nobles read, then they
too would read (a skill the bourgeois had acquired as merchants); if the nobles slept on sculpted wood
among ornate draperies, then so would they. To be seen owning books and elaborate beds became
indicative of one’s social standing. The bedroom became not only the room in which the bourgeois slept
and made love; it became the repository of collected goods — books included — which at night could be
guarded from within the stronghold of the bed. Aside from the books, few other objects were on display;
most of them would be shut away in chests and boxes, protected from the corruption of moths and rust.
From the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, the best bed was the grand prize of a forfeited estate.
Books and beds were valuable chattels (notoriously, Shakespeare bequeathed his “second-best bed” to his
wife, Anne Hathaway) which, unlike most property, could be owned by individual members of the family.
At a time when women were allowed to possess very few private goods, they owned books, and passed
them on to their daughters more frequently than to their sons. As early as 1432, a certain Joanna Hilton
of Yorkshire left a Romance, With the 10 Commandments, a Romance of the Seven Sages and a Roman de
la Rose to her daughter in her will. Excepted were the expensive prayer-books and illuminated bibles,
usually part of the family patrimony and therefore of the eldest son’s inheritance.
The Playfair Book of Hours, a French illuminated volume from the late fifteenth century, shows on one of
its pages the Birth of the Virgin. Saint Anne, the Virgin’s mother, is being presented with the infant by the
midwife. Saint Anne is depicted as a noble lady, probably not unlike Chaucer’s Duchesse (in the Middle
Ages, Saint Anne’s family acquired a reputation for having been wealthy). Saint Anne is sitting upright in
a half-tester bed that has been draped in a red cloth with a golden pattern. She is fully clothed; she’s
wearing a blue dress with gold embroidery, and her head and neck are decorously covered by a white
mantle. (Only from the eleventh to the fifteenth century did people normally sleep naked; a thirteenth-
century marriage contract included the stipulation that “a wife should not sleep in a chemise without her
husband’s consent”.) A lime-green sheet — green is the colour of birth, the triumph of spring over winter
— hangs on both sides of the bed. A white sheet is folded over the red cloth that covers the bed; on this
sheet, in Saint Anne’s lap, lies an open book. And yet, in spite of the intimacy suggested by the little book
(probably a book of prayers), in spite of the protective curtains, the room doesn’t look like a very private
place. The midwife appears to have walked in quite naturally; one thinks of all those other depictions of
the birth and death of Mary, in which the bed is assiduously surrounded by either well-wishers or
mourners, men, women and children, and sometimes even the occasional dog drinking distractedly from a
basin in a corner. This room of birth and forthcoming death is not a space Saint Anne has created for
herself.
A detail from the fifteenth-century Playfair Book of Hours, chronicling the life of the Virgin. (photo credit
10.4)
In Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, bedrooms — like almost every other room in the
house — were also passageways, so that a bedroom did not necessarily guarantee peace and quiet for
such activities as reading. Even curtaining a bed and filling it with one’s personal belongings was
obviously not enough; a bed required a room of its own. (The wealthy Chinese of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries had two types of bed, and each one created its own private space: the movable k’ang,
which served the triple purpose of sleeping platform, table and seat and was sometimes heated by pipes
running underneath it, and a free-standing construction divided into compartments, a sort of room within
a room.)
By the eighteenth century, even though bedrooms were still not undisturbed spaces, staying in bed to
read — in Paris, at least — had become common enough for Saint Jean-Baptiste de La Salle, the
philanthropic French educator canonized in 1900, to warn against the sinful dangers of this idle pastime.
“It is thoroughly indecent and unmannerly to idly chit-chat, gossip or sport in bed,” he wrote in The Rules