Books take you to new heights(01 of10)
Open Image ModalBooks are good for many things. One of them is reading – but not the only one. A dictionary can prop open a door or weigh down flyaway papers. Parading around the room with a book on your head was the traditional finishing-school antidote to the bad posture created by…hunching over a book. Even before they learn to read, your toddlers can perch happily on top of a book – though now that phone companies have discontinued the Yellow Pages, makeshift highchairs are in short supply. Enter the Boost, a book-shaped piece of foam for the smartphone generation.
Books are full of surprises(02 of10)
Open Image ModalUntil 1910, witnesses in English law courts were required to kiss a Bible. Until half a century earlier, when toilet paper was invented, it was equally common to wipe your ass on a page torn from a book or magazine – though usually, of course, a less sacred one. You can press flowers between the pages of a dictionary; you can turn a paperback into a hiding-place for money, or (if you’re Kate Spade) into a handbag.
Lost in a book(03 of10)
Open Image ModalBut books don’t need to go unread to make themselves useful. You can commune with a dead author to avoid interacting with the human beings living around you: \the novel that immerses you in Anna Karenina’s or Emma Bovary’s marital dilemmas can shield you from your own husband and kids. One fan wrote Oprah that "My children now are trained that when they see Mom with a book, they just don't bother me." If you were a Victorian servant, books could absorb you so thoroughly that you risked burning the house down, like this cook reading on the job. Before the invention of gaslight, this was also a reason not to read in bed. (credit:Victoria and Albert Museum.)
Time theft(04 of10)
Open Image ModalIn this illustration from The Story of a Pocket Bible, a maid is engaging in what Walmart would later dub “time theft.” The book she’s reaching down from the shelf is a Bible, and you’d think the religious magazine that serialized this story would have approved. But no: when she gets to the passage that reads “Servants, obey in all things your masters...” she blushes and drops the book. It’s not enough to read the right books: you also need to read them at the right time. You weren’t supposed to read your master’s copy, let alone to drop your duster while reading it on the job. (credit:he Sunday at Home: A Family Magazine for Sabbath Reading 28 (1856). )
One Thing at a Time(05 of10)
Open Image ModalToday, we associate print with earnest, attentive, single-minded concentration: books are read from start to finish, while digital media encourage us to skip around and become distracted. In the nineteenth century, though, books themselves were blamed for encouraging escapist idling. The maidservant in this illustration is also reading a goody-goody book – in her case, not the Bible but a collection of missionary biographies. Instead of her choice of reading material, though, the caption chides her for multitasking:“Jane has left off her business of sweeping and dusting the room, and is looking at the books which were placed on the table. Perhaps Jane has never heard the rhyme: ‘One thing at a time, and that done wellIs a very good rule as many may tell’. (credit:Making the Best of It, and Other Picture Stories. London: Religious Tract Society, n.d.)
Writing the dust(06 of10)
Open Image ModalAlthough at a time when less than half the population was literate, servants who could read and write commanded a higher wage, Victorian ladies and gentlemen still worried about servants who were too good at reading. They could peek into their masters’ books (as in the previous slides), ferreting out secrets that could be used to blackmail the correspondents, wasting time when they should have been working, or even just smudging the pages with wet or soapy fingers. This 1895 cartoon, though, makes clear that uneducated servants could be just as impertinent. (credit:Punch 30 November 1895: 258)
Multitasking mom (07 of10)
Open Image ModalToday, we often blame our smartphones for distracting us. The psychologist Sherry Turkle’s recent book Alone Together argues that "when someone holds the phone, it can be hard to know if you have that person's attention. A parent, partner, or child glances down and is lost." In a less scholarly vein, the blog Parents on Phones assembles snapshots of parents caught in the act of texting at the park, taking a hand off of a stroller or a swing to press “send” or shushing their kids while listening raptly to someone at the other end of the line. These photos are, of course, themselves generated by cellphone-wielding parents: fight fire with fire. (credit:Shutterstock )
Parents on Phones: the Prequel(08 of10)
Open Image ModalBefore there were smartphones, there were books. And before driving under the influence of texting, there was walking under the influence of reading. Victorians like this cartoonist for the magazine Punch already knew that books can be an excellent kid-ignoring tool – if and only if you have the latest multi-tasking technology. In this illustration, that technology is not some digital gadget but an oversized keyring (“chatelaine”), rigged up to leave the mother’s hands free to turn the pages. (credit:Punch 24 February 1849: 78.)
Reading and hiding(09 of10)
Open Image ModalIf parents could hide from their kids behind a book, husbands could also unfurl a newspaper to screen out their wives, and wives hide behind the pages of a novel when they didn't want to talk to their husbands. His and hers, broadsheet and book: these couples recreated at home the discovery be made by commuters on the world's first railway lines that if you look down at a book you don't need to make eye contact with the passenger across from you. (credit:Punch 1 August 1896: 54)
Dirty Books(10 of10)
Open Image ModalAfter the British government set aside funding for public libraries in 1850, reading rooms became one of the first places where citizens could rub shoulders with richer and poorer neighbors. Some readers, though, were unsettled by the thought that the pages they were handling been thumbed by grimier hands. Earlier, censors had tried to deny the poor access to “poisonous” or “unhealthy” books; now, the fear was that respectable ladies could be imbibing germs every time they licked their finger to turn the page. Enter the “book disinfecting apparatus,” which bathed volumes in carbolic or sulphuric acid. (credit:London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1890: 495)