Bunyan's prison life was a very busy one. He did not, says his friend and biographer, the Rev. Charles Doe, "spend his time in a supine and careless manner, or eat the bread of idleness. For there I have been witness, that his own hands have ministered to his and to his family's necessities, by making many hundred gross of long, tagged, thread laces, to fill up the vacancies of his time, which he had learned for that purpose since he had been in prison. There also I surveyed his library, the least and yet the best that ever I saw, consisting only of two books, a Bible and the 'Book of Martyrs.'"
Bunyan's Bible and his Foxe's "Book of Martyrs" came into the possession of Mr. Bohn, the London publisher, and were purchased from him for the Bedford library, where they have been seen by thousands of visitors.
"With those two books," says Froude, "Bunyan had no cause to complain of intellectual destitution. Foxe's Martyrs, if he had a complete edition of it, would have given him a very adequate knowledge of history.... The Bible, thoroughly known, is a literature of itself—the rarest and richest in all departments of thought or imagination which exists."
Besides these books, he seems to have had a rosebush, about which he wrote a poem:—
"This homely Bush doth to mine eyes expose,
A very fair, yea, comely, ruddy rose.
This rose doth always bow its head to me,
Saying, 'Come pluck me; I thy rose will be.'"
He also wrote verses about a spider whose habits he closely watched.
Bunyan's prison, if it had much of discomfort, gave him leisure to read and write—the one thing for which most persons of brain are struggling. "Prisons in those days," says Canon Venables, "and indeed long afterwards, were, at their best, foul, dark, miserable places. A century later John Howard found Bedford jail, though better than some, in what would now be justly deemed a disgraceful condition. One who visited Bunyan during his confinement speaks of it 'as an uncomfortable and close prison.'"