The project met with contempt both from Lane’s senior colleagues at The Bodley Head and from his fellow publishers, who had no interest in selling him reprint rights to their hardcover successes. Neither were booksellers enthusiastic, since their profits would be diminished and the books themselves “pocketed” in the reprehensible sense of the word. But Lane persevered, and in the end obtained permission to reprint several titles: two published already by The Bodley Head — André Maurois’s Ariel and Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles — and others by such best-selling authors as Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy L. Sayers, plus a few by writers who are today less known, such as Susan Ertz and E.H. Young.
What Lane now needed was a name for his series, “not formidable like World Classics, not somehow patronizing like Everyman”.40 The first choices were zoological: a dolphin, then a porpoise (already used by Faber & Faber) and finally a penguin. Penguin it was.
On July 30, 1935, the first ten Penguins were launched at sixpence a volume. Lane had calculated that he would break even after seventeen thousand copies of each title were sold, but the first sales brought the number only to about seven thousand. He went to see the buyer for the vast Woolworth general store chain, a Mr. Clifford Prescott, who demurred; the idea of selling books like any other merchandise, together with sets of socks and tins of tea, seemed to him somehow ludicrous. By chance, at that very moment Mrs. Prescott entered her husband’s office. Asked what she thought, she responded enthusiastically. Why not, she asked. Why should books not be treated as everyday objects, as necessary and as available as socks and tea? Thanks to Mrs. Prescott, the sale was made. George Orwell summed up his reaction, both as reader and as author, to these newcomers. “In my capacity as reader,” he wrote, “I applaud the Penguin Books; in my capacity as writer I pronounce them anathema.… The result may be a flood of cheap reprints which will cripple the lending libraries (the novelist’s foster-mother) and check the output of new novels. This would be a fine thing for literature, but a very bad thing for trade.”41 He was wrong. More than its specific qualities (its vast distribution, its low cost, the excellence and wide range of its titles), Penguin’s greatest achievement was symbolic. The knowledge that such a huge range of literature could be bought by almost anyone almost anywhere, from Tunis to Tucumán, from the Cook Islands to Reykjavik (such are the fruits of British expansionism that I have bought and read a Penguin in all these places), lent readers a symbol of their own ubiquity.
The first ten Penguins. (photo credit 9.15)
A fifteenth-century heart-shaped book of madrigals. (photo credit 9.16)
The invention of new shapes for books is probably endless, and yet very few odd shapes survive. The heart-shaped book fashioned towards 1475 by a noble cleric, Jean de Montchenu, containing illuminated love lyrics; the minuscule booklet held in the right hand of a young Dutch woman of the mid-seventeeth century painted by Bartholomeus van der Helst; the world’s tiniest book, the Bloemhofje or Enclosed Flower-Garden, written in Holland in 1673 and measuring one-third inch by one-half inch, smaller than an ordinary postage stamp; John James Audubon’s elephant-folio Birds of America, published between 1827 and 1838, leaving its author to die impoverished, alone and insane; the companion volumes of Brobdingnagian and Lilliputian sizes of Gulliver’s Travels designed by Bruce Rogers for the Limited Editions Club of New York in 1950 — none of these has lasted except as a curiosity. But the essential shapes — those which allow readers to feel the physical weight of knowledge, the splendour of vast illustrations or the pleasure of being able to carry a book along on a walk or into bed — those remain.
A seventeenth-century Dutch woman portrayed by Bartholomeus van der Helst, holding an undersized volume in her right hand. (photo credit 9.17)
Books as visual puns: a 1950 edition of Gulliver’s Travels. (photo credit 9.18)
In the mid-1980s, an international group of North American archeologists excavating the huge Dakhleh Oasis in the Sahara found, in the corner of a single-storey addition to a fourth-century house, two complete books. One was an early manuscript of three political essays by the Athenian philosopher Isocrates; the other was a four-year record of the financial transactions of a local estate steward. This accounts book is the earliest complete example we have of a codex, or bound volume, and it is much like our paperbacks except for the fact that it is made not of paper but of wood. Each wooden leaf, five by thirteen inches and one-sixteenth inch thick, is bored with four holes on the left side, to be bound with a cord in eight-leaved signatures. Since the accounts book was used over a span of four years, it had to be “robust, portable, easy to use, and durable”.42 That anonymous reader’s requirements persist, with slight circumstantial variations, and agree with mine, sixteen vertiginous centuries later.
A mammoth page from Audubon’s Birds of America. (photo credit 9.19)
The world’s tiniest book, the seventeenth-century Enclosed Flower-Garden. (photo credit 9.20)
The “Sahara Penguin” discovered at the Dakhleh Oasis. (photo credit 9.21)
The eighteen-year-old Colette reading in the garden at Chatillon Coligny. (photo credit 9.22)
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”.1 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.2 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”.3 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!”4 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!”5
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.”6 This may be true; there may be a sense of redundancy in exploring on the 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,7 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”.)8 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.”9 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.”10 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”,11 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”.12 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.”13 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”.14
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”.15 “My custom,” wrote Shelley, “is to undress, and sit on the rocks, reading Herodotus, until the perspiration has subsided.”16 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.”17
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.”18 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.”19 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,
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.20
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 J
osef 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.”21
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.”22 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.
A History of Reading Page 16