Bachelor Brothers' Bed and Breakfast Pillow Book

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, Japan Foundation Fellow 1991-92, and the author of
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered:
Leo Kennedy’s Story.

This is not a handbook for travelers in the usual sense, but humorous
reading for anyone after a hard day on the road. Bachelor Brothers’
Bed and Breakfast Pillow Book is a series of short essays, vignettes,
and imaginary letters by the fictional authors, bachelor brothers Hector
and Virgil, and their friends. Bill Richardson, writer, broadcaster, and
raconteur, won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour for his first novel,
Bachelor Brothers’ Bed and Breakfast.

“Uneven” is the best word for this collection of assorted comic
trivia. In a chapter called “Hector’s Books for Bathroom
Browsing,” among the books suggested is The Faber Book of Aphorisms,
edited by W.H. Auden and Louis Kronenberger. “Hector” gives some
samples, accompanied by snide comments, and adds, “It is easy to
memorize one of these gems while ensconced in the bathroom, and then
impress the dickens out of whomever you might meet on the other side of
the door. ‘Ah! Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with
bricks of religion! Blake,’ you can say, casually, while ambling down
the hall.”

This is humor to be swallowed in small doses, but that’s what it’s
meant for, and that is why it is punningly called a pillow book, with a
sly nod to Sei Shonagon, the 10th-century Japanese woman whose book by
that title is a witty description of court life in Heian Japan.