I love Brian Fagan’s work but I usually associate it with climate history: The Long Summer, about the Holocene, that warm and sunny period after the last ice age ended, when humans settled down, agriculture blossomed, and civilization spread. The Little Ice Age, that period during the middle ages when Londoners danced on the Thames in winter, coastal estates were consumed by storms and buried in sand, and glaciers consumed alpine villages. Floods, Famines, and Empires about the impact of El Niño and La Niña on continents north and south around the world.

This one is different. A lot of people have been talking about another book, At Day’s Close by A. Roger Ekirch, a book that I own and have read but will not be reviewing. It seems like everyone else liked it much better than I did. The thing that captured the public imagination about this book seems to be the chapter on biphasic sleep, the concept of waking after several hours of sleep, doing something else, then returning to sleep again for those last precious hours. I don’t know anyone who is sleeping well now – we’re all suffering from insomnia, real or perceived¹ – and to be told that it’s natural to awaken at night, to do something else² for a few hours, then return to sleep, is enticing.

I don’t buy it.

Anyhow, there was a lot more to Ekirch’s book, lots of interesting tidbits about night in the middle ages, and I did enjoy learning those things but his. book. is. soooooooo. boring.

I enjoyed Fagan’s book so much more. Both books cover similar topics to some extent. And, I will admit, Fagan doesn’t dive into the details as much as Erkirch does – but Fagan is so much easier and, well, fun to read.

Each chapter covers a different aspect of bed, starting with prehistoric times³. The evolution of the bed, from divots in the floor padded with reeds and mats to four-posters. Sleep. Sex. Birth. Death, wakes, and burials (literally). Customs of beds that seem strange to us – it was not unusual, in the 1800s and before, for travelers who were strangers when they checked in at an inn, to share a bed.⁴ The customs of kings and pharaohs who disassembled their favorite beds and carried them with them as they traveled. Hammocks. Beds on boats and trains and Winnebago’s and airplanes. The origins of “working from bed” – nobility entertaining and ruling from bed, and the attendants who hung out with them, sleeping on nearby pallets or just ruling the bedchamber.

And, finally, the current trend – so unusual in the context of history – of the private bedroom, occupied by one bed and the husband and wife, or children, who slept in it. The Victorian tendency for husband and wife to occupy separate beds and sometimes separate bedrooms.

That reminds me of my grandparents’ bedroom, a room I maybe saw once or twice in all the years that I stayed with them. They had an enormous ranch-style house with two living rooms – one where we sat and one where my grandfather placed coffee table books on the couches to keep the dog off them and we never sat – a breakfast room plus a formal dining room; a kitchen where my grandmother cooked meals and baked and another kitchen where my grandfather cut up oranges; two offices – one, my grandfather’s was a power room and the other, my grandmother’s, piled high with Christmas cards to be written and regency romances; a grand hallway the size of my current living room; a powder room larger than my kitchen; and two bedrooms, a guest room larger than my current “main” bedroom with a private bath. And my grandparents’ bedroom, enormous, with a separate bathroom and closet for each of them, each about 30 yards long, and a long hall between. I remember being surprised that they slept in separate twin beds – and how pin-neat the room was, cold and empty, like their marriage.

The book finishes with speculation about what beds and bedrooms could be like in the future.

This book is a real treat to read.

Many years ago I had the pleasure of meeting Bill Bryson, who was a charmingly humble delight to spend time with. He was polite, generous to those who were not in positions of power, and friendly. I loved hosting him at the conference and he was one of the few authors that, in all the years that I ran conferences at which we hosted authors greater and lesser, he was one of the few, in fact, perhaps the only one that I chose to hang out with after-hours. He was enjoyable and friendly and interesting.

I suspect Brian Fagan would be the same. Brian, if you’re ever in New York City, I would like to buy you a drink.

1. Certain people snore all night and then complain that they didn’t sleep a wink. ↩︎
2. Write poetry. Bake a cake. Work on your novel. Anything, as long as it doesn’t involve watching TV or doom-scrolling. ↩︎
3. Pre-human times, actually, the arboreal nests of our ancient primate ancestors. ↩︎
4. Homophobes often freak out when they read that Abraham Lincoln did this, before he got elected president. Homophobes always think the worst of people. ↩︎