There's A Bed in the Piano: The Inside Story of the American Home - Review

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 1999 by Alfred Mayor

by Myrna Kaye (Little, Brown and Company, 800-759-0190), $38.50 (hardcovers).

Reading the American home

Fortune-tellers search tea leaves, archaeologists piece together shards, Myrna Kaye reads rooms and objects in rooms for what they tell her, and by extension us, about the American national character. She claims that her book There's a bed in the piano "is a practical how-to: how to read rooms and furniture, how to put American objects in perspective, how to see the home as a historic cultural document."

This is a broad canvas, and she covers every inch of it, so that a reader might prefer to browse rather than to forge his way from beginning to end. To start with the title, them actually was a bed in a piano, as well as a chest of drawers, two small closets, and a washbasin. The inventor was Charles Hess of Cincinnati and the year, 1866. Abstracted, this multipurpose piece of furniture was a box containing smaller boxes, which leads to the author's proposition that a house is simply a box made up of smaller boxes furnished with yet more boxes.

When in 1874 William Wooton patented a desk with some 110 compartments that folded up and locked with a single key, he invented the compact home office at a time when the office was most frequently at home. Only the advent of the typewriter and stenographer moved business downtown. "Until, that is, the computer began to move the office back home," as Kaye comments with the sort of continuum of associations characteristic of this book.

The slant-front desk, we learn, had its origin in the medieval slant-front writing surface. However, the slant front persisted long after it was no longer used to write on because, Kaye writes, "a sloped lid said 'desk' to all who saw it." The eighteenth-century high chest or chest on chest was not developed for lack of floor space but because it "was a temple to its owner's possessions, all obviously sorted in the mountain of drawers and safely secured - conspicuously safely, to judge by all that brass." In the evolution of the trunk she notes that only four changes have been made since the first trunk, which she proposes was a section of tree trunk split and hollowed out. The first change was to flatten the bottom so the trunk would not roll around. The second was to flatten the back so it would fit neatly against a wall. Even in the early nineteenth century the top and facade of trunks remained rounded. Finally, in mid-century the facade and top were squared so that trunks could be packed more economically into the holds of steamships. Yet Kaye illustrates a trunk with a rounded top made in 1868 and later brought to Minneapolis by a Norwegian couple, and comments: "For craftsmen, change decreases efficiency; for their customers, change decreases familiarity. People usually want things to look 'the way they always did.' The past is such a power in the form of things that people change furniture shapes no more than they must." These are the sort of leisurely ruminations that make this book such a pleasure to dip into.

Another fruitful vein that Kaye mines is the origin of words now used in a different context. The "board" of "bed and board," for example, was originally just that - a board that served as a table. "Chairman" (as in of the board) evolved quite logically from the fact that only the man of honor had a chair when everyone gathered around the board. Other men and women sat on stools, and children on benches. The word sofa is an eighteenth-century borrowing from the Arabic suffah, which was the cushion between the camel and its saddle. The Murphy bed that folded up into the wall was claimed by a New York City manufacturer named Murphy. However, it is also true that Murphy, derived from Morpheus, was slang for sleeping and also a slur on Irish immigrants.

In a related vein Kaye has adopted the acronym "fawbit" for the "fictional account without basis in truth." In Savannah a tour guide affirmed in a plausible fawbit that "Deal desks are so called because merchants signed deals on them." "Fawbit: people put fringe on chairs and draped cloth over their pianos because prudish Victorians, thinking bare legs sexy, forbade bare wooden furniture legs in their parlors." And so forth, all neatly indexed under "fawbit."

The illustrations, all in black and white, are as eclectic as the author's theories and examples. They range from the bed in the piano to a thatched house of about 1965 in Cameroon and from a Cycladic statuette of a harpist to "Mrs. Rogan and her son in the kitchen" in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1941. The index is excellent, fawbits and all.