The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber by Nicholson Baker

Author:Nicholson Baker [Baker, Nicholson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: American, Essays, Non-Fiction, Language Arts & Disciplines, Literary Collections, Literary Criticism, Rhetoric
ISBN: 9780307807519
Google: hfrrzI_Y9hAC
Amazon: B005GFIIUS
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-23T23:00:00+00:00

Eventually, armoires came to look more like modern bookshelves, shedding their cupboard doors, but thievery and misshelving led to the collateral invention of another deterrent: book chains. The books were flipped around, with their fore-edges rather than their bindings facing outward on the shelf; rings were clipped or riveted to their front covers; and these rings were linked to surprisingly thick, dangling, Jacob Marleyesque chains, some short, some several feet in length, whose other ends encircled iron rods that ran horizontally in front of a shelf or across the top of an angled lectern. Michelangelo designed a chained library. A bookcase historian named Burnett Hillman Streeter, who was a canon of Hereford Cathedral in the 1930s, and a loving restorer of its chained library, reports that libraries at Cambridge remained on leash until the early part of the seventeenth century, while at Oxford the practice persisted until 1799. Samuel Johnson would have read chained books; and when Coleridge some-where laments the impossibility of escaping the fetters of language—when he says, “Our chains rattle, even as we are complaining of them”—perhaps he has the memory of book chains specifically in mind.

So the Pottery Barn catalog is invoking centuries of monastic and academic tradition when it observes that books were once stored in armoires, as were clothes and linens. But can its copywriter truly believe that anyone is now going to keep a book collection behind the closed pine doors of a $999 cupboard? No. Catalog designers long ago learned for themselves and put into earnest practice the observation that one of Anthony Powell’s characters made when he drunkenly pulled a glass-fronted bookcase down on himself while trying to retrieve a copy of The Golden Treasury in order to check a quotation: “As volume after volume descended on him, it was asserted he made the comment: ‘Books do furnish a room.’ ” Catalog designers know perfectly well that books, if we are fortunate enough to own any, should be out there somewhere, visible, shelved in motley ranks or heaped on tables as nodes of compacted linearity that arrest the casual eye and suggest wealths of patriarchal, or matriarchal, learnedness. Books entice catalog browsers, readers and nonreaders alike, into furnishing alternative lives for themselves—lives in which they find they are finally able to perform that contortional yoga exercise whereof so many have spoken, and can “curl up with a good book.”

What, then, will the Pottery Barn’s armoire hold in practice? The catalog copy quietly goes on to note that this piece of furniture is “roomy enough to hold a 20”-deep television or stereo equipment (holes must be drilled in back).” Now we see: it makes a nice decorative envelope for a TV—but it can’t be pictured performing that primary and perfectly legitimate duty, because that would interfere with the catalog browser’s notion of him- or herself. What will make the browser pause and possibly lift the phone is the promise, the illusion, that the armoire is magical, that the spirit of those beautiful

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