Yet standing can also confer power. In Romance languages, the word for “seat” comes from the same root as “sedative.” “Sit” is what humans tell dogs. Looming over a seminar table, I struck students dumb: the tallest person in the room is usually the loudest. Prevented from sitting at their level, I saw words like “authoritarian” sprout on my students’ evaluations. I’d like to think the opposite was true; no longer able to twist my body like a sunflower to feign interest in other speakers, I actually had to listen.

The icon for disability is a wheelchair: the paradigmatic cripple sits while others stand. The reverse, though, turned out to prompt almost as much stigma. Flight attendants treated my unbuckled seat belt like an open straitjacket. I brought books to places where upright reading wouldn’t be remarked upon: rush-hour subways, checkout lines. In museums, I stood staring at portraits of sitters. David’s 1793 painting showed the Jacobin martyr Marat dying in a bathtub, flanked by an inkstand and a pool of his own blood. To treat his dermatitis herpetiformis, Marat had been soaking in vinegar while answering the mail. The painting’s success boosted demand for over-the-tub writing trays. Their buyers may have been missing the point. Rousseau called pornography “books one reads with one hand,” but reading with one hand kept dry while the other soaps enables subtler pleasures. I keep books by the bath because it’s the one place you can’t take notes; sometimes, one wants to be prevented from multitasking.

My reading positions wouldn’t have seemed so strange in earlier eras. The Romans needed no chair to sit on or table on which to rest their scrolls; in an age when adults regularly read aloud, standing allowed the voice to project. Doctors recommended reading as a healthy exercise for body and mind: it expanded the lungs, strengthened the arms, and stretched the back. Only once the unfurled scroll gave way to the folded codex did readers began to hinge at the waist as well. Medieval monks perched or stood at attention before the vellum that they were illuminating, but eighteenth-century readers bedded books thanks to the rise of safer candles and to the shrinking of trim sizes. Previously as large as a 1950s mainframe, a text containing pornography or treason could now be slipped into a pocket. Readers since then have returned to the vertical, scanning billboards, hiding behind a broadsheet, tucking their faces into a laptop’s fold, and screening their face behind a phone like some court lady’s fan.

A Bible feels different when it inhabits a pulpit or a reader’s lap; a newspaper, when its headlines are read while loitering opposite the newsstand or spread on the breakfast table. Whether the reader’s neck or back bears the brunt depends not just on the printed or electronic object itself, but on the surfaces that support her body and her reading material. In the early days of tablet computing, the designer Craig Mod proposed to customize fonts not just for differently sized devices, but also for different distances from the eye: “Bed (close to face),” “Knee (medium distance from face),” and “Breakfast (far from face),” the latter in order to keep crumbs away.3

The rise of literacy can be told as a story about desk height and spectacle design. Reading, we all know, takes effort. But so does physically supporting a book, unless one outsources that work to a piece of furniture. The historian Erich Schon points out that before around 1800, books were most often depicted in hands or on knees. Only once books came to rest on tables did the reader’s bodily contact with the text dwindle to an occasional touch of the finger: eyes replaced hands.