One of the things they never tell you about the book business is how much sitting is involved. Reading and writing demand immobility, and immobility has consequences.
There was a lot of sitting in my last job, too. But there I would leave the house in the morning, drive to work, take the long walk from my parking stall to my office in another part of the corporate campus, head to my first meeting, and afterward spend the day traipsing from building to building, meeting to meeting, or down the street for coffee or lunch, before heading home again, having walked several thousand steps and climbed a lot of stairs (for a few years I took the stairs exclusively, even to meetings on the tenth and seventeenth floors.) The routines of office life guaranteed that minimum of motion.
This new life does not, and certainly not when combined with lockdown. Last September, it occurred to me that apart from a half-hour of daily exercise, I was almost completely sedentary. Those regular five or ten minute walks between meetings on the corporate campus had been replaced by twenty or thirty steps to the kitchen, the mailbox, the john.
At the same time, Iāve read the warnings about the dangers of a sedentary lifestyle. According to the World Health Organization, two million people die every year from physical inactivity. Which is how many people have died from Covid. Itās a top ten leading cause of death and disability. And sedentary lifestyles increase the risks of cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and obesity, the risks of colon cancer, high blood pressure, osteoporosis, depression, etc. The WHO estimates 60% to 85% of the worldās population is sedentary, āmaking it one of the more serious yet insufficiently addressed public health problems of our time.ā
Alarmed at what I was doing to my body, feeling like the hippo who lolls weeks at a time in the same muddy pool, eating 2.5 percent of its massive body weight each day, I decided in September to change things up.
I first tried reminding myself to get up and move every hour and set an alarm to assist me. It didnāt take. When youāre a big-league concentrator, you can reach over and turn off the alarm without even being aware youāve done it.
Fine, I thought, Iāll start working out twice a day. That didnāt last a single day.
Reluctantly, I turned to the standing desk thatās been standing undisturbed in the corner of my home office for the past few years. I canāt remember why I bought it. I donāt think I used it for more than six hours before leaving it to collect dust. My back got sore after an hour or two of standing and I quit. I meant to dispose of the desk but never got around to it. Fortunately.
I started standing for an hour or two a day in early October and by Christmas, having learned the trick of laying a foam mat beneath my feet, I was able to stand all day without strain. It felt like an enormous achievement, never mind that every person in the foodservice, cleaning, and retail fields does it without thinking.
Beyond that fleeting sense of accomplishment, my life hasnāt changed. I do feel marginally more energetic and slightly less concerned about my health. Otherwise, Iām simply upright more often, and it feels as natural to stand up to work as it used to feel to sit down to work. Thereās no self-help book in the experience.
The fun came over the holidays when I decided I was sufficiently committed to standing to pimp out my desk.
Itās a modest desk. I bought it because it was solid (steel), compact, adjustable, mobile (wheels), inexpensive, and highly rated on Amazon.

I also learned to set up the display so that it extends rather than mirrors my laptop display. I can now have two full-size documents side-by-side on the monitor with email and slack open on the laptop. This is something every eighth-grader can do but, again, I felt a rush of accomplishment, until the laptop display went blank.
The display went blank for the first time last summer after I dropped the laptop. It came back on in an hour or so. A couple more drops through the autumn and the blackouts got longer. Itās been out almost two weeks now so Iāve ordered a new laptop. The Macbook Air with the M1 chip. Iām excited about it, hoping it can handle better than my dying laptop enormous word documents.
I got a task lamp that clamps to the desk to better light the papers to either side of my laptop.
I purchased a monitor arm that clamps to the opposite side of the desk from my lamp. Itās not for my monitor. I spend a lot of time taking notes from books or from manuscripts or papers that Iām reading, and I have no room on this small desktop for a reading stand. So I built a simple bookstand from wood and attached it to a āfull-motion articulating gas spring monitor armā and I can now have the books and papers at eye-level directly at the left of the Thunderbolt display, or out of my sightline if I donāt need them. I can also move the task light to illuminate whatās on the book stand.
Cord management was becoming a problem so I got a power bar with six outlets and a bunch of USB and USB-C ports. Itās attached to the deskās frame. Somehow, in a paperless, wireless world, I still have a lot of paper and wires.
Thereās a hook for my headphones (they, too, are wired ā I hated having to always charge the Bluetooth ones).
My pens and pencils sit on the top shelf in a National Post mug affixed to the surface with mounting putty.
My printer is on the bottom shelf. Itās Bluetooth, doesnāt need charging, just plugging in, and it works fine.
The one thing I havenāt been able to find is a good cupholder. Just as itās easy, when youāre a champion concentrator, to turn off an alarm without noticing, itās also easy to knock over a water bottle without noticing, at least until itās too late. (That also explains the mounting putty under my pen cup). Wanting to keep the bottle off the desktop, I searched Amazon for cupholders. There are some brilliant designs for automotive, marine, cycling, and stroller cupholders. All I could find for desks was this:






Boris of Brexit
The Spectator says that Tom Bowerās biography of Boris Johnson pulls punches, ostensibly because Bowerās wife is a fan of the British prime minister. That may be a better indicator of the UK mediaās habitual viciousness toward other members of the UK media (Boris, of course, was a long-time Daily Telegraph and Spectator hack) than it is of normal human relations or biographical standards. Boris Johnson: The Gambler seems plenty vicious. Says one of Bowerās sources:
Thereās a pattern to Borisās life: itās the casual dishonesty, the cruelty, the betrayal, and beneath the betrayal the emptiness of real ambition: the ambition to do anything useful with office once it is attained.
Addās Johnsonās daughter, Lara: āHeās a selfish bastard.ā
That was 2020!
A horrible first half of the year, and a scorching second half. That was the book publishing world in 2020. Hereās what the New York Times said about it:
With so many people stuck at home and activities from concerts to movies off limits, people have been reading a lot ā or at least buying a lot of books. Print sales by units are up almost 8 percent so far this year, according to NPD BookScan. E-books and audiobooks, which make up a smaller portion of the market, are up as well.
āI expect that at the end of the year, when you look at the final numbers,āĀ Madeline McIntosh, chief executive of Penguin Random House U.S., said of the industry, āit will have been the best year in a very long time.ā