I found myself in bed manhandling this enormous book and turning its pages. It was too cumbersome. Hence this silly little post. (Also, there’s no room in the bookcase for the book, so its home appears to be the coffee table.)
I read books in bed
I don’t do a huge amount of reading in bed, but I’m getting into it. After years of trying I’ve managed to ditch bed time social media and reading my mobile phone and I try and get in 10mins minimum of reading words on paper. I’m currently reading Scott’s The Antiquary, and itching to get it finished so I can get into Smollett’s Humphry Clinker. Theses two books sit on the bedside cabinet.
Every once in a while I’ll take a notion to read something different and that urge led me to write this post. Most books I’ve taken to bed (don’t worry, my wife knows about this) are average sized. See the table below: I haven’t measured the height of all books I’ve read in bed, haven’t added up all those measurements and haven’t divided that number by the number of books in the group…in order to get an average. A glance at my bookshelf gives me the average height. I then throw a ruler up against it. The result you see in the table.
Shortest to tallest books I’ve read in bed
| Height | Size | Name of Book (shortest to tallest) |
|---|---|---|
| 13.5cm | Shortest | The Beaux-Strategem George Farquhar (1707) (play performed in 1707, this version published in 1914) |
| 24.3cm | Average | Young Boswell Chauncey Brewster Tinker (1922) |
| 42.0cm | Tallest | James Boswell’s Book of Company at Auchinleck 1782-1795 (eds) Viscountess Eccles and Gordon Turnbull (1995) |
Reading a tall book in bed
When a book’s as tall as Boswell’s Book of Company it’s too easy to get distracted by the wrist control required to keep the book upright and prevent it from collapsing on my face, possibly knocking my front teeth out. It means I don’t remember anything I’ve read. It becomes an exercise in balance. And then I have to tilt my head back so I can see the lines at the top of the page…then tuck my chin into my chest to read the text at the page bottom. (Reading Farquhar’s jolly little play The Beaux-Strategem’s perfect for those of us who don’t like tilting our head. Now there’s a ridiculous sentence, for you!)
The heaviest book
Far be it from me to open up a competition about the heaviest book ever read in bed. One that comes to mind, and I’ve written about it before, is George Birkbeck Hill’s Footsteps of Dr Johnson (Scotland) (1890; this edition 1973). That measures a paltry 28.6cm in height…dwarfed by Boswell’s Book of Company. Oh, and weight? Hill’s tome weighs in at 1.95kg. Boswell’s Book of Company weighs 2.43kg. We have a new king in town. Not for reading in the bedroom, however…just too huge.
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