By extension, the intellectual work—or lack thereof—elicited by different literary genres can be made visible by the uprightness—or lack thereof—of the bodies that hold them, even of the furniture that holds those bodies. In eighteenth-century paintings, the reader sprawls on a sofa or lolls at the hairdresser’s; a fine snow of hair powder dusted the pages. In 1835, Balzac addressed his novel Father Goriot to “you who are holding this book in your fair white hand, you who sink down in your soft easy chair.” When Lucy Soulsby declared, “I have no faith in reading that is compatible with an arm-chair,” she was privileging those kinds of reading that required a writing desk over those that manifested spinelessness.4

Dickensian clerks perched at high stools, like McMansion dwellers at a breakfast bar. At the end of the nineteenth century, though, bodies and papers changed places in the office. The women taking over formerly male-dominated office jobs subsided into chairs, while vertical filing forced papers that had once rested flat onto their edge, thanks to new cabinets guaranteed to prevent “sagging or slumping in drawers.”5

As copying and filing became women’s work, writing literature retained its manly aura only by eschewing comfortable chairs. Hemingway explained in a 1950 letter that “writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.” Nabokov told a Playboy interviewer that “I generally start the day at a lovely old-fashioned lectern I have in my study. Later on, when I feel gravity nibbling at my calves, I settle down in a comfortable armchair alongside an ordinary writing desk; and finally, when gravity begins climbing up my spine, I lie down on a couch”—the same position, perhaps, in which that magazine containing the interview was read.6 At the turn of the millennium, the position in which men wrote remained as distinctive as the posture in which they peed. Donald Rumsfeld worked standing, and Dick Cheney bought an adjustable-height desk propelled by the same pneumatic lifts used in chairs.

Centuries before the Kindle became the device of choice for nursing mothers (one-handed swiping makes it possible to hold a baby in the other hand), labor-saving devices aimed to take books off readers’ hands. Bookmarks began their life as prosthetic fingers.7 Even the “index” takes its name from the second digit, used to hold one page open while flipping to another. Renaissance inventors designed Ferris wheel–like contraptions in which each volume rides flat on a tray, open to just the right page; lazy Susan–like bookshelves that spin the desired book into arm’s reach; lecterns equipped with angle brackets and height-adjustable screws. One such 1588 machine promised to spare “those who are indisposed and tormented by gout” the trouble of lifting their books. Today, on the contrary, we adjust our chairs in relation to a fixed-height reading surface.

At the end of the nineteenth century, one early adopter proposed a solution to back pain: sound recording. Reading, Octave Uzanne pointed out, “forces our bodies into various fatiguing attitudes. If we are reading one of our great newspapers it constrains us to acquire a certain dexterity in the art of turning and folding the sheets; if we hold the paper wide open it is not long before the muscles of tension are overtaxed, and finally, if we address ourselves to the book, the necessity of cutting the leaves and turning them one after another, ends by producing an enervated condition very distressing in the long run.” But he also worried that the solution would soon give rise to a new problem: “Just as oculists have multiplied since the invention of journalism, so with the phonography yet to be, the aurists will begin to abound.”8 As Siri’s ladylike voice resurrects the days when bosses dictated to secretaries, so audiobooks automate the eighteenth-century servants who read aloud, standing discreetly behind their master’s chair.