In the beginning was the word.

But we couldn’t remember the word, because we couldn’t write it down.

Welcome to Textbook Sleep, the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid podcast that reads aloud boring, public-domain textbooks to put you to sleep.

Tonight’s textbook examines the mysteries of how things work, and how they came to be. Including writing. In fact, it leads with writing as the invention that made all others possible, or at least able to be passed down through the generations.

The Book of Wonders, published in 1915, is edited and arranged by Rudolph J. Bodmer.

If you were awake, which you won’t be, you’d hear me drone on about the “Age of Stone,” where a “long, tapering instrument of stone, the first pen, was invented.” Asleep, you won’t hear me mention that the Egyptians, in the 14th or 15th century B.C., invented an iron stylus to mark soapstone, limestone, and waxed surfaces.

And look where it has led. Not just to immortal works of literature like The Odyssey, Hamlet, and Jonathan Livingston Seagull, but to this very podcast. If that’s not progress, it’s hard to imagine what is.

Let us begin by ringing our dragon-handled bronze Vietnamese bell three times, with the official Textbook Sleep spoon. Sweet dreams, listener.

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Welcome to Textbook Sleep, the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid podcast that reads aloud boring public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep.

What a treat we have for you tonight. While in Textbook Sleep #11 we delved into the theory of accounting, now we get even more specific, more dull, more brain numbing.

Who knows what the “voucher system” is? I don’t, and I doubt you do, either. Fortunately, you will not learn what is, as you will be sound asleep. I will not learn—I will make word sounds not but understand them.

What constitutes a “joint-stock company” will remain a mystery to both of us.

Tonight’s textbook, Cyclopedia of Commerce, Accountancy, and Business Administration was “prepared by a Corps of Auditors, Accountants, Attorneys, and Specialists in Business Methods and Management” in 1910. We read from the fourth of 10 volumes.

But none of what I read will be on the quiz, because there is no quiz. There will also be no 18-page paper to turn in, no final exam.

In the immortal words of T. Rex, let’s bang a gong, get it on.

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Have you ever eaten the king of nuts, the budded or grafted paper shell pecan?

That’s the grabber introductory sentence of a sales letter in Business English by Rose Buhlig of Tilden High School in Chicago, published in 1914.

You will not hear me read it, as you will be already sawing logs. But I wanted to give you a little sample of the supreme soporificness of tonight’s lesson on writing.

Welcome to Textbook Sleep, the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid podcast that reads aloud boring public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep.

We’ll examine the Introduction, the Salutation, the Courteous Close, even how to fold a letter. This is Buhlig’s dogged thoroughness, a boon for budding salespeople, but even more useful to loyal Textbook Sleep listeners.

Did you know the kernel of the grafted or shell paper pecan is as nutritious as beef and as sweet as honey?

Let’s begin by gently ringing the bronze Vietnamese bells, the signal for us to put aside care and worry—and replace it with approaches to writing a letter requesting payment.

Additionally, have you found that the Holeless Socks are coming up to our guarantee? We feel they merit their popularity. If you need more of them, we can make shipment at once.

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Business English is just like English English, only more twisted and tortured and obfuscatory. If you’re good at it.

Fortunately for our purposes, it is also—almost without exception—incredibly boring.

Welcome to Textbook Sleep, the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid podcast that reads aloud boring public domain textbooks to help you fall asleep.

Tonight’s textbook, from 1914, is Business English by Rose Buhlig of Tilden High School in Chicago.

We will begin with Part I, Chapter I: Interesting Words. But they are not at all interesting. They will certainly not keep you from falling asleep, practically unable to awaken as if their multisyllabic monotony has cast a magical spell over you that not even the kiss of a handsome prince or princess could break. A dog or cat might do it, however—even a Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid podcast can’t do anything about that.

Let us begin with our new bell chimes that expunge care and worry from all those who hear them.

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Have you ever had a hankering to learn about the Codling Moth? The Cankerworm? The Hessian Fly?

Of course not. They are not only deadly to crops, they are deadly boring.

In other words, perfect subjects for Textbook Sleep, the podcast that reads aloud boring public domain textbooks to help you fall asleep.

It has come to my attention that some listeners play Textbook Sleep while doing chores, as something to relax to. We counsel against this, as you may find yourself waking up on the floor next to the washing machine or on top of the vacuum cleaner. We are, after all, a Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid—nonprescription but habit-forming.

Thus we continue tonight with Agriculture for Beginners by Burkett, Stevens, and Hill, first published in 1903.

You will likely be asleep before we get to “the troublesome Chinch Bug.” Few will make it to the Twig Girdler. Let us begin.

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Welcome to another episode of Textbook Sleep, the podcast that reads aloud boring public domain textbooks to help you fall asleep.

My voice is also boring. When I speak to people on the phone, it’s not unusual that I hear snoring and have to hang up.

Tonight we read again from Agriculture for Beginners, by Burkett, Stevens and Hill, first published in 1903. We’ll be hearing about hotbeds, Cold-Frames, celery, tomatoes, striped cucumber beetles and something called dewberries, whatever they are.

To be more accurate, I’ll be hearing about them, you will be fast asleep. Maybe you will dream about dewberries, about putting a dollop of whipped cream on them, or baking them into a pie.

I hope that you do not dream instead about striped cucumber beetles.

Let us proceed with Horticulture, Section XXV. Pull up the blanket. Adjust your pillow. And sleep my pretties, sleep.

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Welcome to another episode of Textbook Sleep, the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid.

We read aloud boring public domain textbooks to help you fall asleep.

This time we’ll be exploring Agriculture for Beginners, by Burkett, Stevens and Hill, first published in 1903. Today, few of us work in agriculture, the profession that keeps us alive and yet we take for granted.

The information contained herein may be the most valuable to humankind ever assembled in one book, unless we intend to go back to being hunters and gatherers, and there are no Pringles in that world, so forget it.

That doesn’t mean it’s not boring—there is an entire chapter on Feed Stuffs and seven pages on the Cotton-Boll Weevil. My eyelids are already drooping. A listener in California writes, “Now I am suffering from somnia,” and perhaps you will be, too.

Let us get to it, then.

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Textbook Sleep, the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid podcast, combs the planet to find the most boring public domain textbooks to read aloud to help you fall asleep.

Tonight we continue with one of our greatest discoveries: A History of Experimental Psychology by Professor Edwin Boring. In 1950, it sold 16,765 copies, an indication to me that 16,765 people were trying to self-medicate their sleeplessness by reading it before bed.

You, on the other, can simply listen to my voice, which has a soporific quality that sometimes renders people unconscious as I speak to them at parties. They drop like a stone. Surely it’s not my conversational chops that’s lacking.

Let us let Professor Boring bore us to sleep, then. We’ll begin with his description of the third decade of experimental psychology, going all the way back to 1880. If you hear any long pauses, it’s possible I myself have nodded off. It’s a risk I take.

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Well, we have hit the mother load of boring textbooks to read from: A History of Experimental Psychology by—wait for it—Edwin G. Boring, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.

You would have thought that this poor man would have tried to overcompensate for his family name with lively writing on a subject others might find interesting. But no. Boring is boring, at least to me, and I hope you will find his 1929, 710-page tome sleep-inducing as well.

With this ponderous discovery, Textbook Sleep, the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid podcast enters a new, even more powerful realm of soporific communication. Dare we now call it Textbook Sleep, the Ultra-Strength Sleep-Aid?

Okay, let’s pull up the covers. Or maybe, the lever on the La-Z-Boy. It’s sleepy time.

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The Machinery of the Universe. Hang on, that actually sounds interesting! Not to worry—it’s not. It’s physics, but with an interesting title—academic bait and switch. But for the purposes of Textbook Sleep, the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid podcast, this 1915 public-domain book by A. E. Dolbear, A.B., A.M., M.E., Ph.D., Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Tufts College, is just right for settling us in to a long winter’s nap. Your Apple Watch may wonder if you’ll ever wake up. It’s just the machinery of the universe, working perfectly to power you to sleep. Let’s start, shall we?

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