Assault of activity books to entertain while pooping

Being entertained during crucial moments of the day is becoming easier.

Reading on the throne is centuries-old. You must entertain yourself, even if it’s bottle labels. The rise of the mobile phone as the perfect squeeze companion has made paper (the non-hygienic kind) obsolete, and magazine racks in bathrooms are rarer. In fact, bathroom books have always been available. However, this unique subgenre has been experiencing an editorial renaissance.

Toilet users used newspaper to wipe themselves after using the restroom before toilet paper was invented. The paper is soft and absorbent. Psychological studies suggest that the custom has always been done to distract the brain from the smell of excrement. Psychoanalysis has addressed the issue: James Strachey called it infantile, and Otto Fenichel said it is a sign of childhood trauma and an unconscious attempt to preserve the self when we feel part of our organic matter is going down the drain. Literally.

This created a literary label with very broad definitions, which Margaret Atwood, an author of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, defended: “The bathroom is a place where you can pretend to do one thing while reading. Nobody can interrupt. Compendiums of this and that are great bathroom reading: mini-books within larger books.” Because of this, bathroom reading is light and quick, from miscellanies to ‘The Shadow’ and other instant gratifications.

Since toilet literature is diffuse and unclassifiable, we can set some success milestones. Since 1988, ‘Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader’ has been a genre classic. Ever since, they have attended every annual appointment, which now includes dozens of compilations and monographs on specific topics. These books’ classic themes and approaches include curiosities, rumors and urban legends, small biographies, newspaper clippings, compilations of unusual deaths, and toilet trivia. Over 15 million copies of the series have sold.

The boom now
We’ve always had Spanish toilet books, but since last year we’ve found a strange group with “caca”, “trono”, “water” and derivatives. They are pastime books, not cultural miscellany like ‘Uncle John’s’. Like kiosk-sold crossword puzzle magazines, but cuter.

Because they are meant to be read in less-than-sterile environments, they are cheap (rarely more than ten euros), so the packaging should be durable. Amazon returns about forty titles for “while you poop” searches. Searching “on the throne” yields twenty more. More elaborate titles include “Visiting Mr. Roca.”

The boom is real, but many of these books may be print-on-demand. Juan Ramón Motoso Martín, the author of “Visiting Mr. Roca” and other digital books, has a diverse bibliography with AI-generated covers and content, spanning from children’s riddles to football data.

But many others are real and fill bookstore thematic stands. The boom has created subgenres like criminal. For some time, bookstores have had books with murders to solve, but we now have crimes to solve in the bathroom: ‘Find out the murderer while you poop’ or ‘Crimes and mysteries to solve while you poop’, which sometimes multiply with slight title changes.

Clearly, the phenomenon is not new, but it returns periodically. Perhaps the recent awareness of how much time we spend on our phones is to blame, and more people are deciding not to use TikTok while on the toilet. Blessed are the crimes that can be solved in intimacy.

Assault of activity books to entertain while pooping

Being entertained during crucial moments of the day is becoming easier.

By knl9j

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Assault of activity books to entertain while pooping

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