The Size of Thoughts by Nicholson Baker

Author:Nicholson Baker [Baker, Nicholson]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-80751-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2077-08-23T16:00:00+00:00

How thoughtful of the Pottery Barn catalog to send its customers back on this short but fiery thematic mission, and at the same time to rescue Mary Ward Brown’s Tongues of Flame from the prospect of absentminded immolation—flinging it out the window, as it were, toward us, simply by photographing it. Bookstores and book reviews deal with new books, and even antiquarian booksellers can only align old books on their silent shelves, where they wait for buyers. But the junk-mail catalogs—sent out by the millions to people who never asked for them but nonetheless look through them from time to time and puzzle over the versions of life they present—go further, extending to past books the courtesy of present inclusion, and surrounding printed fiction with life-size fictional rooms that resemble our own real rooms except that they are a good deal neater, costlier, and more literate.

We know that it’s a lie. One of the larger pieces in the Pottery Barn catalog is the Sierra Armoire, made of wormwood and machine-flagellated pine. The armoire, pictured with one of its double doors ajar, is stuffed with a miscellany of books whose bindings glimmer from its shadows: a textbook of pathology from before the Second World War, an original hardcover of Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March, Paul Horgan’s Citizen of New Salem, a bound German periodical from 1877, and also—so deeply shadowed that only its width and the faintest hint of a typeface give it away—Tongues of Flame. There isn’t a self-help book or a current best-seller to be seen, because the men and women who live in the rooms of the mail-order catalogs never read best-sellers. In fact, they never read paperbacks. Next to the picture, the description says, “Long before there were closets to house clothing, linens and books, armoires did the job.”

Well, this is true. Bookcases, or book cupboards, were called armaria as early as the first century, when some books were still published—that is, multiply copied—on rolls (volumina) and stored on their sides, with little tags hanging from their ends that bore their titles. Seneca, who died in the year 65, rather scornfully mentions book-bearing armoires inlaid with ivory in his essay “On Tranquillity of Mind.” And in one of the earliest surviving pictures of a book armoire, found in a manuscript called the Codex Amiatinus, from the eighth century (but possibly copied from an earlier, now lost manuscript, the Codex Grandior), the books, large and bound in red, lie flat on the shelves, with the doors of the armarium open. The picture is reproduced in John Willis Clark’s The Care of Books, a monumental history of the bookcase, first published in 1901. Professor Clark also quotes from the Customs of the Augustinian Order, which required that the armarium be “lined inside with wood, that the damp of the walls may not moisten or stain the books,” and that it be “divided vertically as well as horizontally by sundry shelves on which the books may be ranged so as

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