The Size of Thoughts

by Nicholson Baker

  always the auctioneer returned with a higher bid, until the price far exceeded the actual value. Then I asked the auctioneer to show me the competitor who offered so much. He introduced me to a gentleman in magnificent garments and when I addressed him as Doctor, telling him that I was willing to leave the book to him if he needed it badly, as it was pointless to drive the price up higher, he replied: I am neither a scholar nor do I know what the book is about; but I am in the process of installing a library, in order to distinguish myself among the notables of the city, and happen to have a vacant space which this book would fill.

  Books fill vacant spaces better than other collectibles, because they represent a different order of plenitude—they occupy not only the morocco-bound spine span on the shelf, but the ampler stretches, the camel caravans of thought-bearing time required to read them through. If you amass a private library of hundreds of thousands of volumes, as the great Caliph Hakim II of Córdoba did before he died, in the year 976, you can feel confident that you have secured a kind of implied immortality: you die owning in reserve all the hours and years it would take those who outlive you to read, not to mention copy over, the words each book contains—and that bank of shelved time is your afterlife. And if you will your books to a cathedral library, or to a university, with the firm injunction that the books you give be chained in perpetuity (a stipulation that a number of English and Italian library benefactors included in their wills), you can’t truly die, or so you may secretly believe: you can’t sink to infernal sub-basement floors or float off to some poorly lit limbo, because your beloved delegation of volumes, the library that surrounded you in life, and suffered with you, and is you, is now tethered firmly to the present; you will live on, linked by iron and brass to the resonant strongbox of the world’s recorded thought. One testator of 1442 asked that his rare books be chained in the library at Guildhall, so that, he says, “the visitors and students thereof be the sooner admonished to pray for my soul.”

  But no deterrent, including chains, is a guarantee of immortality. Books can burn, and they can suffer depredations under various kinds of zealotry, and they can simply get sold off for cash or mutilated by misguided conservators. The particular manuscript that the tenth-century Arabic scholar coveted and couldn’t afford (he doesn’t tell us what book it was) was very probably a casualty of several attendant centuries of civil war and turmoil in Spain. A satisfyingly heavy blue tome from 1939, called The Medieval Library, tells us that by the time Philip II of Spain was fitting out the library of the Escorial, not a single Arabic manuscript, nothing from the glory days of Córdoba, could be found anywhere in the kingdom. (“Fortunately, the capture of a Moroccan galley in which a considerable number of Arabic books and manuscripts was found relieved the royal librarian’s embarrassment,” writes S. K. Padover.) In England, tens of thousands of manuscripts—works that would have been dusted with foxtails by dynasties of whispering attendants in the Vatican if they had been fortunate enough to escape there—perished during the suppression of the monasteries in the sixteenth century. They died slowly in some cases: used to polish candlesticks and boots, to wrap pies, to press gloves flat, or to repair broken windows. Manuscripts of Duns Scotus, who later became Gerard Manley Hopkins’s preferred scholastic philosopher, were nailed to the walls of outhouses and torn off page by page, forced to become, as one proud library purger wrote, “a common servant to evere man.”

  All this distant adversity has one positive effect, however: the books now on our shelves become more ornamental and more precious—regardless of their intrinsic worth—by the charged, Lindisfarnean absence of the books that could have influenced or improved them, directly or at many removes, but can’t because they are lost. This explains why some of us, like eager high-school science students doing a unit on fruit flies, are drawn to study up close the short-lived images in catalogs or magazines, in search of tiny, attractively arbitrary points of literary embarkation. These books happen to be the books we have now. They’ve made it—made the leap from library catalog to mail-order catalog. They’re survivors. I haven’t yet ordered one of the tall revolving-shelf bookcases that the Levenger company, that very successful maker of “Tools for Serious Readers,” sells, but I did recently look up the multi-volume Biographical History of Massachusetts, published in 1909, that Levenger has shelved for display in the revolving bookcase shown on the cover of its early-summer catalog. I found, in Volume II, the story of Henry Albert Baker (no relation), a nineteenth-century dentist and lecturer on oral deformities, who in 1872 discovered the principle of the pneumatic dental mallet, a device used for forcing wads of silver amalgam into excavated molars. Baker, in the words of his biographer,

  happened to have in his hands a tube such as boys use for bean-blowers. At the same time he had in his mouth a round piece of candy which dissolved rapidly. He playfully put one end of the tube between his lips and accidentally the candy slipped into the tube. He covered the lower end of the tube with his finger to prevent it from dropping. As soon as he felt it touch his finger he sucked the candy back and to his surprise it flew up the tube with such force that he thought he had fractured one of his front teeth. He lay awake nearly all the following night trying to evolve a plan to utilize the force so mysteriously concealed. The next morning he was at the machine-shop bright and early and within three days he had the pneumatic mallet complete.

  What could be more worth knowing than this? We could do worse than accept the reading suggestions that fall unsolicited through our mail slots.

  There is a surprising further development in the history of the book and the bookcase. Not only is the book the prop of commonest resort in the world of mail order; but objects that resemble books—nonbook items that carry bookishly antiquarian detailing—are suddenly popular. The book as a middle-class totem is in fashion to a degree not seen since Joseph Addison in 1711 encountered a private library containing dummy books of “All the Classick Authors in Wood,” along with a silver snuffbox “made in the Shape of a little Book.” (“I was wonderfully pleased with such a mixt kind of Furniture,” he wrote.) Catalogs now offer book-patterned ties, book brooches, and settees covered in trompe-l’oeil-bookshelf fabric. Pier 1 recently advertised a round glass-topped table whose base is a fake stack of nine large leather-bound books. The latest Horchow Home collection includes, for $869, an entire coffee table made in the image of two immense faux books hewn from chunks of beechwood; the top one is pretending to be Volume I of an Italian edition of Homer. The catalog for See’s candies sells the Chocolate Classics, a book-shaped box of candy bars. The Paragon gift catalog offers a fairly awful table clock with one fake gold-tooled book perched on top and two fake books underneath, bearing the legend, in gold script, “Times to Remember.” Paragon also has an ex-libris frame for snapshots, in printed fabric, showing many shelves of black- and red-bound books—black and red being the colors, we remember, of the poor scholar’s books in The Canterbury Tales. A catalog called Ross-Simons Anticipations has a three-hundred-dollar mirror whose frame consists of several “shelves” of artificial old-style book spines, so that when you check your tie you’ll be thronged with literary feelings.

  And then there is the Eximious of London catalog, which began appearing in American mail pouches several years ago. (“Eximious” is an archaic word meaning “distinguished” or “select.”) It carries a four-volume set of book coasters (water-resistant), and a book pencil pot covered with precise replicas of Volume IV of an old edition of the collected works of Racine. I spoke with Cricket, of Customer Service, who told me that the Racine pencil pot was probably their best faux-book seller. And there is the so-called “scholarly magnifying glass with faux bookspine handle.” The handle is a vividly lifelike mold taken from a book called Ramsay’s Poetical Works. It’s a provocative choice. Allan Ramsay wrote verse in what to an American ear is intolerable Scottish dialect, but he also has the distinction of having opened, in Edinburgh, in 1725, the first circulating library—a place where,
as in a modern video store, you rent what you can’t afford to buy. Ramsay thus initiated the great change in the demography of readership that takes us from eighteenth-century Gothic chambers of sensationalism to the nineteenth-century coronation of the novel as the preeminent literary form, and, eventually, to the complete subordination of leather-bound books of poetry like Ramsay’s own.

  Finally, there is the Faux Book Cassette Holder. Several companies sell false fronts for cassettes, CDs, and videotapes, but this is the only one that made me want to read some Shakespeare. The product turns “an unsightly situation into a stunning bookshelf asset,” Eximious says. “The mellow row of books looks exactly like a set of leather-bound antique volumes, because the resin mould was actually taken from such a set.” What set is it? It’s the Pickering’s Christian Classics collection, published in the 1840s by the bibliophilic William Pickering, who had a thing for miniature books, or what librarians call “tinies.” His tiny of several Latin poets drew the attention of Gladstone himself, who noted with approval that it weighed only “an ounce and a quarter.” I couldn’t put my hands on a copy of Saltmarsh’s Sparkles of Glory, the eleventh volume in Pickering’s row, or on Hill’s Pathway to Piety, but I did read some of the ninth volume—Christopher Sutton’s Learn to Die, a reprint of a work first published in 1600, in black-letter type. Those embarrassing multicassette pop-music anthologies you may have bought (or, rather, I may have bought) on impulse, by phone, while watching Court TV—the ones with titles like Forever ’80s, or The Awesome ’80s, or Totally ’80s—can now reside, shielded from inquisitors, behind the binding of a book that contains morbidly helpful thoughts such as this:

  Seeing therefore, that on every side, wee have such urgent occasion, to passe the dayes of this wearysome Pilgrimage in trouble, and pensivenesse of minde, may wee not thinke them thrice blessed, who are now landed on the shoare of perfect Securitie, and delivered from the burden of so toilesome a labour: May wee not bee refreshed, in calling to minde, that this battaile will one day be at an ende, and wee freed from the thorowes of all these bitter calamitites?

  As for beauty, Sutton writes:

  Doe not some few fits of a feaver, marre all the fashion? The inconstancy of all worldly glory! All this stately and pageantlike pompe shall vanish away, and come to nothing, as if it never had bene.

  Just the right note to strike in a cassette holder. As I read Learn to Die, I began wondering whether Christopher Sutton had been spending time at the Globe Theatre: variations on phrases and metaphors from Shakespeare’s late plays, especially from soliloquies in Hamlet, kept cropping up. Even the opening words of the book—“That religion is somewhat out of joynt”—recall Hamlet’s announcement that “the time is out of joint.” So I got down a copy of Hamlet, and soon saw that I was mistaken. It wasn’t that Christopher Sutton had been hearing Shakespeare; it was that Shakespeare had been reading Christopher Sutton: Learn to Die came out in 1600, while Hamlet wasn’t produced until about 1602. And yet Sutton isn’t listed in any study of Shakespeare’s sources that I checked, or in the Arden Hamlet, or in the nineteenth-century variorum edition of Hamlet by Horace Howard Furness. Could the Eximious catalog be giving us, for only $51.50 plus shipping, an admittedly minor but nonetheless significant and as yet undissertationed source for Hamlet’s death-fraught inner sermons? Could a mail-order catalog be sending us to graduate school?

  It is a little disorienting, though—the wish to disguise one’s cassettes or one’s videotapes behind this extreme sort of leathery surrogacy. Better, truer, braver it would have been for Eximious to market a set of faux Penguin paperbacks, intermingled with a few faux Vintage Contemporaries. Our working notion of what books look like is on the verge of becoming frozen in a brownish fantasy phase that may estrange us from, and therefore weaken our resolve to read, the books we actually own. Hamlet, who was tolerant of bad puns, might have been tempted to point out that when a book turns faux it may cease to be a friend.

  If we momentarily resist the gold-filigreed leather archetype, we may discover that the essential generous miracle of the bound book—which is the result of its covert pagination (that is, its quality of appearing to have only two surfaces when closed but in fact fanning forth dozens or hundreds of surfaces when opened)—is, right now, undergoing more technical experimentation and refinement and playful exaggeration than at any other time in its history. The book, considered as a four-cornered piece of technology, bound on one side, is still surprisingly young. Signs of its youth are to be found, naturally, in the children’s section of the bookstore, where a brilliant corps of paper-engineers have lately made their mark. The children’s section has third-generation pop-up books that arch and pose under the stress of page-turning like protégées of Isadora Duncan. There are lift-the-flap books, which carry subordinate pages on their pages, offering further surprises of surface area, and yet allow their flaps to be torn off without protest. (My son, who is one and a half, spends an hour each day reviewing his now flapless lift-the-flap books.) On these shelves you’ll find letter-pouch books, like The Jolly Postman, and up-to-date variations on the old textural pat-the-bunny and feel-daddy’s-scratchy-face theme; you will encounter rows of miniature, stiff-paged Chunky or Pudgy books, and the foam-padded Super Chubby series from Simon & Schuster, and the patented double-wide House Books from Workman Publishing, all of which boldly make a virtue of the necessary thickness of the non-virtual page. Even Goodnight Moon is now a board book. And there are books here with neo-medieval tabs to hold them closed, and real wheels to roll on, and books that have a hole in every page and a squeaking pig in their heart. There are books that are really toy kits with pamphlets, like Build Your Own Radio, published by Running Press, which when opened reveals circuitry, not words; or the Make Your Own Book kit, with paper and binding glue; or consummations like The Mystery of the Russian Ruby, which includes its own Sherlock Holmesian hinged bookcase disguising a secret stairway and a disappearing high-heeled foot; or the folio-size construct that calls itself a book, and is published by St. Martin’s, a reputed book publisher, but that upon opening burgeons into a 360-degree two-story Victorian dollhouse. Upstairs, near the fireplace, there is a small lift-the-flap book cupboard holding six weighty, untitled volumes.

  Several times lately, encouraged by this foliated ferment in the children’s section, or by the confident bibliophilia to be found in the bulk-mail catalogs, I have stood before my own six undistinguished bookcases, and regarded the serried furniture they hold with a new level of interest and consideration. The best bookcase moment, I find, is when you reach up to get a paperback that happens to sit on one of the higher shelves, above your head. You single it out by putting a fingertip atop the block of its pages and pulling gently down, so that the book rocks forward and a triangle of cover design appears from between the paperbacks on either side. The book’s emergence is steadied and slowed by the mild lateral pressure of its shelved peers, and, if you stop pulling just then, it will hang there by itself, at an angle, leaning out over the room like an admonishing piece of architectural detail; it will not fall. Finally the moment of equilibrium passes: the book’s displaced center of gravity and the narrowing area it has available for adjacent friction conspire to release its weight to you, and it drops forward into your open hand. You catch the book that you chose to make fall. And, with any luck, you read it.

  (1995)

  (i)

  Now feels like a good time to pick a word or a phrase, something short, and go after it, using the available equipment of intellectual retrieval, to see where we get. A metaphor might work best—one that has suggested itself over a few centuries with just the right frequency: not so often that its recovered uses prove to be overwhelming or trivial, nor so seldom that it hasn’t had a chance to refine and extend its meaning in all kinds of indigenous foliage. It should be representatively out of the way; it should have seen better days. Once or twice in the past it briefly enjoyed the status of a minor cliché, but now, for one reason o
r another, it is ignored or forgotten. Despite what seems to be a commonplace exterior, the term ought to be capable of some fairly deep and marimbal timbres when knowledgeably struck. A distinct visual image should accompany it, and yet ideally its basic sense should be easily misunderstood, since the merging of such elementary misconstruals will help contribute to its accumulated drift. It should lead us beyond itself, and back to itself. And it should sometimes be beautiful.

  The mind has been called a lumber-room, and its contents or its printed products described as lumber, since about 1680. Mind-lumber had its golden age in the eighteenth century, became hackneyed by the late nineteenth century, and went away by 1970 or so. I know this because I’ve spent almost a year, on and off, riffling in the places that scholars and would-be scholars go when they want to riffle: in dictionaries, indexes, bibliographies, biographies, concordances, catalogs, anthologies, encyclopedias, dissertation abstracts, library stacks, full-text CD-ROMs, electronic bulletin boards, and online electronic books; also in books of quotations, collections of aphorisms, old thesauruses, used-book stores, and rare-book rooms; and (never to be slighted, even if, in my own case, a habitual secretiveness limits their usefulness) in other living minds, too—since “Learned men” (so William D’Avenant wrote in 1650, when the art of indexing was already well advanced) “have been to me the best and briefest Indexes of Books”; or, as John Donne sermonized in 1626, “The world is a great Volume, and man the Index of that Booke.”

  Boswell, for example, said, in the last pages of his biography, that Johnson’s superiority over other learned men “consisted chiefly in what may be called the art of thinking,”