If you are reading this, you probably read real books. If you are at all like me, you don’t like to break the spines or crease the covers of paperbacks. This is all fine, until you are sitting outside on a beautiful day enjoying a book on revolutionary France that weighs about two kilos (all modern books on France seem to weigh about that much). That’s a lot of book for aging arms to hold up. Some elders might find it uncomfortable even with both hands, and then there’s the tendency to lose one’s grip.

After searching high and low for a designed solution, I solved it with my own homebrew design. This is my gift to you.

Needed:

• Vendor snack tray made of light wood with adjustable strap. I bought one online that was billed as being for theme parties and showed a woman in ballpark vendor drag with a tray full of popcorn bags. Cost about $30–like what you would spend for one large new book.
• Velcro patches x 4, typically sold in little packets for ~$5
• Thumbtacks x 4, cost probably $0
• Hammer (you surely have one)
• Tape measure (if you’re as fanatical as me about alignment; you surely have one)
• Strap pad like the ones for seatbelts (optional, cost roughly $10-15)

Method:

• Sit down and adjust the strap on your neck so that the tray resides where you would like to have the book rest. For me it was about 12″ from my face, so I could read without reading glasses.
• Take four of the small rough velcro patches (you won’t need the soft fuzzy sides; do as you like with those). Measure the center of one side and stick the four patches where they will press against your clothing. I spread them over about a 6″ area.
• Put the tray somewhere that you can pound against, like the overhang of a sturdy counter, with the patches up so that the counter backs up the tray’s rim.
• Since adhesives never hold reliably, knock a thumbtack into each velcro patch. Obviously, excessive force is neither desirable nor needed. My granny could have done this. You got wood rather than plastic so you could do this.
• Get a big thick book you like, sit down, put it into the tray, and see how you like the fit and feeling. Some people have neck issues (for example, maybe they had spinal cord surgery between C2-C3 with partial vertebrae loss and still get sore muscles; feel free to ask me how I know this) and a heavy book would be hard to support with a strap roped over the back of your neck unless you had a soft pad for it. If so, get the pad mentioned in the ingredients. The only people who can’t really use this are those whose necks simply cannot support the weight of book + tray.
• Adjust the fit, alignment, and every other factor in play until it comfortably holds a book so that your hand can hold the pages open without effort.
• Happy reading.

The end result is you’ve got a wooden tray suspended from your neck, held in balance by common sense and kept from moving about by friction from the velcro. If you avoid putting your page-holding hand on the edge of the tray, it’s lighter. There’s room to lay a bookmark, a pen if you like one, or a little reading light if you find that helpful.

• Cost: $35-45 plus about five minutes of effort.
• Payback: immediate and lasting. Experiment as you like, use whatever works best for you, and enjoy your books anywhere you sit.