Last week, when I was staying in a hotel in Toronto, I went through all the drawers in the room, looking for my phone charger. I searched the dresser, both bedside tables, the desk, the closet, and finally found the charger in the bathroom. In the end, however, I had the weird sensation, often described in detective novels, of having not seen something else that should have been there. And suddenly I knew what it was: I hadn’t seen a Gideon Bible.
I realized, in fact, that I hadn’t seen a Gideon Bible in a hotel room for quite some time. There wqsn’t one in our room in Nashville, last April, nor in the motel where we stayed in Flesherton, Ontario, in May, nor in the motel in Chelsea, Quebec, a few weeks ago. Gideon International has been placing bibles in hotel rooms since 1908, when the first was placed in a hotel room in Superior, Montana. The society claims that 30 percent of hotel-room guests take them out of the drawers and read them. Still, it also says it has been less diligent lately in placing bibles because people can now read the good book on their smart-phones (if they have the Gideon Bible App).
The absence of Gideon Bibles in hotel rooms evinces in me a strange sense of loss. I have never actually read a Gideon Bible in a hotel room (or anywhere else), but I must say I liked the idea of it being there. I found it comforting to be looking for something in a drawer in a hotel room – a sock, an envelope, a phone cord – and finding a Gideon Bible in the bedside table. It seemed to smile up at me, like a Shmoo in an old L’il Abner comic, and say, “Here I am.” Maybe the first hotel room I ever stayed in had a Gideon Bible (it almost certainly did), and so I now consider a hotel room without a Gideon Bible to be somehow incomplete, like a doctor’s waiting room without a two-year-old Sports Illustrated (I never read those, either).
In any case, the absence of Gideon Bibles makes me think of other things we used to take for granted that are no longer here anymore. Like telephone booths. (Doctor Who’s Tardis isn’t a telephone booth, it’s a time machine disguised as a call box. Today it would have to be disguised as something more ubiquitous: an ATM, perhaps.) Remember when you could get a free road map at a gas station? There used to be telephone directories in hotel rooms, too, but they seem to have gone the way of Gideon Bibles. We should note the passing of such cultural markers. They may be small and inconsequential when they exist, but when they cease to exist they quietly denote the end of the security that comes from being surrounded by familiar objects.
Which is particularly important in hotel rooms. Cees Nooteboom, the Dutch travel writer and novelist, writes in his book Nomad’s Hotel that a hotel room is problematic; it’s unfamiliar territory in which we are required to sleep. It first has to be “conquered,” he writes, and doing this requires that we fill it with familiar objects: a book to read, our clothes hanging nearby, our own soap and our favourite toothpaste beside the sink. And, one could argue, a Gideon Bible in the nightstand.
I’m not advocating the return of Gideon Bibles. I’m just saying that a hotel room without one feels empty. That’s probably because it is empty: hotel managers haven’t replaced the Gideon Bible with something else, they’ve just stopped providing Gideon Bibles. After searching for my phone charger, I felt the hotel room to be a colder place, as though the last degree of cultural warmth had been drained from it. William J. Bennett, the former U.S. Secretary of Education (under Reagan), has remarked that, in a phrase cited by Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism, “if every American student were required to read Homer, Shakespeare, the Bible, and Jefferson, then we would achieve a full sense of national purpose.” In other words, reading the Bible will make Americans more patriotic, and we know where that idea has led.
But what if hotels put something else in their nightstands instead. Like a book by a local author. If you were staying in a hotel in, say, Montreal, your room could contain a copy of a book by Mavis Gallant or Michel Tremblay. If you were in Beijing, a novel by Gao Xingjian or Madeleine Thien might grace your beside table. In London, a book of stories by the late Martin Amis. In Bucharest, The Balkan Trilogy, by Olivia Manning; in Tokyo, 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami.
This is further to a thought I had when Merilyn and I were driving across the United States in 2008, which I aired in our book about the trip, Breakfast at the Exit Cafe. We stayed in a lot of chain motels, all of which seemed designed to make it impossible to tell what state we were in, let alone which city. We’d be in a motel in, say, Redding, in northern California, and on the blandly papered wall, above two Styrofoam cups and a Koenig coffee maker, would be a framed print of Manet’s Garden at Giverny, while through the window would be a majestic view of the Rocky Mountains. Why not hang a painting of those mountains by a local artist instead, I thought? To which I now add: and place a book of essays by John Muir in the nightstand.
In that way, a person reading in a hotel room would experience the two senses of travel that Nooteboom explores in his book: travelling through physical space, and voyaging through time. The guest will have travelled to the room, and would also be transported, as in Doctor Who’s Tardis, to an imagined time when Muir’s beloved redwoods soared above the motel, or to a China ravaged by the Cultural Revolution. Such a guest would discover perhaps not a national purpose as envisioned by Bennett, but a deeper awareness that would benefit everyone, everywhere.
That would be great. Nothing is less inspiring than an empty drawer. Good luck!
You're right, Peter, Indies are the innovators. As in bookstores and cinemas. We could do a little research before we travel, so when the hotel owner says, "Local what? Writer??? Like, who?" we could give them a few suggestions. Get the local independent bookstore involved, too. This could be big!