I have just spent a whole day reading Terry Pratchett’s Wintersmith, ensconced so deep in a bean bag that I needed help to get out of it. I have been since wondering about the different positions in which we read, and the role of furniture and accessories in acts of reading.

It is useful to remember that reading in comfort is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the early centuries of printing, books could be lifted only with both hands and that too with difficulty. Mostly used for church liturgy, they could be as large as two feet by one foot and had to be placed on lecterns before they could be read. The idea of books being read for pleasure was a remote one, though in The Canterbury Tales the Clerk of Oxenford does carry 20 books — bound in red or black — to be read on horseback, and presumably a portable lectern.

From large books which were chained to library shelves to railway yellowbacks which would easily slip into one’s pocket would take almost four centuries. In the 16th century though, the legendary Aldus Manutius, the inventor of the italic, printed octavo books, similar in size to a modern paperback. By the end of the 18th century, heroines in plays and novels are shown reading on sofas and chaises-lounge, or even in their beds. Such articles of furniture also made it possible for ‘unsuitable’ reading matter to be quickly concealed if any guardian-figure appeared without warning.

By the mid-19th century, the railway age was well and truly underway, and with it, reading on trains. Such books would have to be small and easily portable, nestling inside one’s overcoat pocket and not weighing too much. They would also not have cost more than the journey ticket and been of sufficient brevity to be finished between, say, London to Liverpool. Finally, due to the constant shaking of the train and poor illumination, they would have to be printed in fairly large type. All these went into the making of the railway libraries and their distinctive yellowback titles, uniformly priced at two shillings. In India, five partners established the A. H. Wheeler chain in 1887, which now serves over 250 railway stations.

Books continued to become smaller in the 20th century, with the US army issues of pocket books during World War II probably being the smallest. Given the spread of mobile phone technology, it was only a matter of time before someone had the bright idea of making children’s classics downloadable on cellphones: this happened last year in England through a system called the ICUE, intended to encourage reading among children. What next? Glasses with in-built monitor and memory which allows one to read while staring vacantly into space? Pass me my reading glasses, dear...

(The author is a professor of English at Jadavpur University)