The glory of the loo book

Which books (if any) have you got in the loo at the moment? The term ‘loo book’ has come to mean ‘lightweight/undemanding humour book’ – but does it have to mean that? The three titles currently gracing my own cistern have made me consider the question. They’re Collected Poems by Philip Larkin, The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins and Londoners by Craig Taylor. None of them, you’d have to say, particularly lightweight.

It’s not that there isn’t a place in the nation’s smallest rooms for conventional toilet tomes. The best of these can be great books, from theDaily Telegraph’s unpublished letters through Schott’s Original Miscellany to Why Don’t Penguins’ Feet Freeze? There are even specially-tailored books, the ones you might call site-specific — like Luke Barclay’s A Loo with a View (spectacularly-positioned karzis from Mount Sinai to Zambia), or Mark Leigh’s The Loo Companion. The latter contains such gems as the fact that Psycho was the first film to show a toilet flushing, and a list of people who died on the throne.