Books By The Bed

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28980, 22 August 1959, Page 3

Books By The Bed

[A Fourth Leader in "The Times"] Putting people up for the night under present-day conditions may sound less glamorous than do the week-end parties of the good old days of gracious living. We have to take it on trust that they were good days. But there is one point on which we can be quite sure: they did not put as much strain on a hostess as does a last moment candidate for a pint-size spare room in a London flat or an unexpected descent on a country cottage of two or three motoring friends. These calls on hospitality may excuse this or that lapse from those tiresomely high standards of vanished and fabled gracious living. But there is one thing that they do not excuse, and that is the absence of books from the visitor’s bedroom. A guest who is expected to go to sleep without a book within hand’s reach a guest with a grievance. If he or she has given even a brief warning of impending arrival it is fair to expect to find some little sign that known likes have been taken into account. Le Galliene remembered staying with his wife, soon after they were married, at LockerLampson’s Cromer house. Their host brought up to them, at bed time, two volumes, both in manuscript. One contained love letters of Keats to Fanny Brawne and the other some Shelley letters to Mary. That was too much in the grand manner for today. Leaving purely personal choice out of the question, is it possible to lay down any general rule for what is acceptable in the way of bedside books in a spare room? It is easy to establish negatives. A great tome, however entertaining its contents, is more nuisance than it is worth for the reader who is pleasantly curled up. A first edition is frightening; one is afraid of spilling the morning tea on it. Nothing that cannot be sampled between passing from half-awake to sleep last thing at night or from half-asleep to awake first thing in the morning makes the grade. * To be positive and to be limited to, say, half a dozen little volumes sets a nice problem. Let us rule out one of the six as the individual—the joker in the pack —the private compliment of hostess to guest. What about the other five? A detective story must be there. So must a stalwart, old-stager novel—such as a Trollope in the ‘‘World’s Classics”; it is light to hold and no harm is done if the reader falls asleep or gets up to have a bath after a few pages. A fourth ‘‘must” is a verse anthology and the better its contents are mixed the more it is likely to give casual and unexpected pleasure. That leaves two more and the only thing to say about them is that the perfect hostess has on her shelves a choice, however small, made from among those shy books that have been bestsellers, that never Obtrude themselves, and that are always welcomed when introduced to a stranger by one of their old friends.