Reading at the toilet
Reading during the ritual of the toilet, especially that part of it devoted to the coiffing, has a long but mostly unrecorded history. Look for examples in any barber's shop or hairdressing saloon, for they are among the traditional newscentres of our common people and the focus of gossip. It is the custom not only to exchange news and views in such resorts, but to read the papers while waiting your turn, as the saying is, or during the operation itself. Every bookman (and most ordinary men) knows how fruitful in meditation are the solitary moments of the toilet when we are faced only by our own soapy visages. George Wyndham committed Shakespeare's Sonnets to memory while shaving, and many others have found this operation productive of literary memories, which are a kind of reading by proxy of the imagination, for to remember is as profitable as to re-read...
H. Jackson. The Anatomy of Bibliomania.
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