The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber

by Nicholson Baker

The Size of Thoughts, a collection of essays that have appeared in the New Yorker and other publications, includes one never-before-published piece on the world of electronics. The essays celebrate the joy--and exquisite details--of everything from library card catalogs and reading aloud to the significance of wine stains on a tablecloth.Baker turns any subject, from feeding a child to phone sex, into literature with a style that is sparklingly original, frequently beautiful, and always thought-provoking. The Size of Thoughts, through its varied forays into the realms of the overlooked, the underfunded, and the wrongfully scrapped, is a funny book by one of the most distinctive stylists and thinkers of out time.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Literature, Philosophy, American, History, Anthologies

372 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 19, 1996

About the author

Nicholson Baker is a contemporary American writer of fiction and non-fiction. He was born in Manhattan in 1957 and grew up in Rochester, New York. He has published sixteen books--including The Mezzanine (1988), U and I (1991), Human Smoke (2008), The Anthologist (2009), and Substitute (2016)--and his work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, the New York Review of Books, Best American Short Stories, and Best American Essays. He has received a National Book Critics Circle award, a James Madison Freedom of Information Award, the Herman Hesse Prize, and the Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1999, Baker and his wife, Margaret Brentano (co-author with Baker of The World on Sunday, 2005), founded the American Newspaper Repository in order to save a large collection of U.S. newspapers, including a run of Joseph Pulitzer's influential daily, the New York World. In 2004 the Repository’s holdings became a gift to Duke University. Baker and Brentano have two children; they live on the Penobscot River in Maine.

Reviews

[Buck · Rating 3 out of 5]

What happened to Nicholson Baker, I wonder? The earliest pieces collected in The Size of Thoughts are so dazzling that, when I first dipped into them, I nearly fell off my barstool. (Okay, it was actually a food court stool, but still, I was all set to jab my plastic fork in my chest out of sheer, dyspeptic envy). Written for The Atlantic Monthly when Baker was still in his mid-twenties (bastard), these early pieces are exquisite little riffs on philosophical themes: the concept of rarity, the process of changing one’s mind etc. They’re the type of stylish, whimsical things a modern-day Lamb might write – assuming he were funny and, um, not dull.

So the young Baker is a pretty cool guy, if coolness is compatible with extreme bookishness (and I kind of hope it is). But then, about halfway through the Reagan administration, Baker changes course. He gives up his funky, downtown loft and moves out to the literary suburbs, where he loses himself in harmless, married-guy enthusiasms: model airplanes, film projectors, the manufacture of nail clippers (I shit you not). He’s still a genius, mind you, but he’s a genius in sandals and knee-high socks, watering his perfectly manicured lawn…

That’s not to say there isn’t some good stuff even in the most obsessive and geeked-out of the later essays. I appreciate his fealty to the commonplace, his loving attention to the homely hardware of modern life. And nobody, but nobody, can describe complex industrial processes with Baker’s degree of oddly poetic exactitude (granted, nobody else would even want to). What’s missing here is just that drop of youthful insolence you find in the early writings, where he had the audacity to be brilliant and precious and skewed, all at the same time. The grown-up Baker is more responsible, and a few shades less purple, than his younger self, but he’s also that much less charming. And I’ve got to say I miss the insufferable prick.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 2 out of 5]

The earliest essays in this collection, labelled ‘Thought,’ are more like hyperliterate blog posts, or a Pascal Pensée, than anything resembling a conventional work of non-fiction. I haven’t read anything more word-drunk (overwritten?) outside the columns of Will Self and frankly, I didn’t expect it from Baker. Baker, of the thumbnail novel, the svelte entertainment—clearly, he needs a place to flex his writerly muscle, and the essays are that unfortunate destination. At no point does Baker stray from his own interests, so we have pieces on model aeroplanes, movie projectors, and ‘clip art’ (not the Microsoft Word variety), written in the style of a man in his shed, utterly oblivious to the audience outside of a certain Nabokovian preciousness in the prose and self-congratulatory wordplays and archaisms. Baker seems to delight in exhausting a topic well past the point most people might find it engaging—his essays ‘The History of Punctuation’ and ‘Leading With the Grumper’ are witty pieces that seem to get the balance between obsessive detail and when to stop correct, the rest do not. Sadly, a tediously long (and dated) piece on online library catalogues, and an 150-page essay on the word ‘lumber’ broom out the reader with staggeringly dull pedantry. The essay ‘Lumber,’ in particular, falls flat since it offers no explanation as to Baker’s motivation for studying the word ‘lumber’ (outside a randomness of purpose, which isn’t good enough!), making his dry excursion through early English poetry in search of lumber utterly meaningless and, eventually, unreadable as the footnotes and lengthy quotations from obscure poets and critics pile up and pile up with no significant payoff in mind. (I gave up halfway through). Baker doesn’t seem to have much purpose in his essays, outside the man-tinkering-in-his-shed—he writes like a one-man trivia machine, interesting in parts, forgotten moments later. And the cover is hideous. Orange!?

[Rand · Rating 5 out of 5]

A humble monument to one man's journey from reader to author; towards actualization along the lines of time, personhood, society.

The sort of collection meant to refresh a reader's own process of thought while fostering a greater love of learning. A treasure-trove of wisdom as homespun as your great-great-great-great-great grandpappy's knapsack. The sort of book to cherish alongside Emerson, Aesop, Benjamin Franklin or Walter Benjamin: proof that the Post-Industrial Age has not by any means signaled the death-knell of refinement in cognitive processes.

The chocolate sauce recipe alone is a thing of poetry— the simplification of pure decadence, perfect for pouring over any dessert— a most delicious prose snippet and testament to the sheer joy of being— which, were we living in a just world would be printed on an index card perforated along the book's outer binding.

Thought comes in all sizes but in essence is always wisdom when leavened by Baker.

[Kathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have never been a fan of the stream-of-consciousness, thought-dissecting, see-how-many-pretty-adjectives-I-can-squeeze-into-a-sentence essay. Had I not scanned this book's table of contents before beginning to read in earnest, I would probably have put it aside after the first few postmodern meanderings. However, I knew that perseverance would pay off, for two-thirds of the way through The Size of Thoughts comes "Discards," the 1994 New Yorker essay that sparked Nicholson Baker's fine Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper.

By the early '90s Baker had hit his stride as a nonfiction writer: he knew exactly the tone that would make readers shout with dismay about the wanton destruction of card catalogs by some of this country's finest, most user-centered research libraries. By then it was too late to save the objects of his ardor. However, reader response was so positive that Baker expanded his scope and began his current crusade to save newspapers and physical books, which he discovered were being scrapped as digital versions were made or simply to make room for more copies of Robert Ludlum and Sandra Brown.

"Books as Furniture," the essay that follows "Discards," takes an often-amusing look at the ways in which mail-order firms have used good-looking but obscure volumes as set decoration. If not for these two entries, I would have assigned The Size of Thoughts just two stars. Had they appeared in a volume all to themselves, it would have earned four. Proponents of PoMo, please take note.

[Jerry Morris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some very good pieces, and some that are merely fodder. The best is "Discards": what happened to the provenance history and other data on library cataloge cards when university libraries switched to online database systems in the 1990s - a must read for the lover of books formerly owned by famous people. "The History of Punctuation" comes in second for being informative, followed by "Books as Furniture" for being witty. "Lumber," which the author calls "the printed products from the lumber-room" – the mind, I found to be an interesting read, all seven pieces of it, and on a variety of subject matter. But I wasn't impressed with the remainder of the book, about the size of the author's thoughts, much less the other topics he was writing about.

[Ryan Chapman · Rating 5 out of 5]

God, to have Nicholson Baker's brain. Where you and I might casually wonder about, say, the history of punctuation, Baker will camp out in the library until he's provided dissertation-level research in a breezy ten-page essay. One of my favorite books to revisit.

[Dan Pasquini · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nicholson Baker has an acrobatic command of the language and he deploys it in a full commitment to considering absolute minutiae (e.g. nail clippers, the smell of glue, whether the squares of wax paper that wrap a pastry can be accurately called “tissues,” the virtues of library card catalogs). I laughed out loud at least eight times. That final essay on "lumber," which takes up the whole second half of the book, though? We don't need to speak of it. It never happened. Don't even start it and let it tarnish the brilliance of a true original.

[Daniel]

This settles it: Nicholson Baker is crazy, but he's my kind of crazy. Who else would write a 150 page essay on the subject of lumber? Who else would write an essay about toenail clipper that turns into a clapback against Stephen King? Who else could write with such passion about the pleasure of writing in pen on erasers? Certainly not everyone's taste, but NB sustains my utter joy in the minor details of life, which are often its major pleasures.

[Hamuel Sunter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had previously read two of these essays—"Recipe" and "Ice Storm"—for a creative writing course, and they convinced me to pick up Baker's novel Traveling Sprinkler. It was good but not so good that I continued to dip into his back catalog.

Two years later and The Size of Thoughts found me. A friend, also an English teacher, also named Sam, visiting from Honshu the week before he was to return to the US, arrived at my apartment with a few items he had no desire to haul across first the Pacific on a 20-some-hour-flight and then the continental states on a monthlong road trip. Detritus, maybe. Cast-offs, certainly. But such perfect and personally significant lumber I couldn't refuse a thing. I took his darts, his Tintin in Tibet t-shirt, and this book.

He raved about the book. Had raved for months. Had described the ravings of his mother, a respected book critic, too. But, he warned, watch out for the last essay, "Lumber"—not so much an essay as a novella-length literary investigation into the phrase "lumber-room" in its now-archaic meaning of "mind." He advised me to read it first or not at all, but I had already started the book's first essay and have a bad habit of rigidly following signage and established procedure. So I went front-to-back and only got to "Lumber" after 206 pages of Baker's scrutinous intelligence, which felt a little like being asked to run a half-marathon at the conclusion of a marathon.

But, wobbly legs and all, I loved it. It made me want to read and read and read. "Lumber" and the other essays on books and libraries, in particular, are outstanding. In them, at his best, Baker puts me in mind of Borges and his utter devotion to the word. And what higher compliment is there for a reader than that?

[Joshua Buhs · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first essay is deceptive. It is about how we change our minds, and argues--not convincingly, but correctly--that we do so in weird, unaccounted for ways--there is rarely an epiphany, and when those are in our stories of conversions they usually come from later reconstructions. He wants to delve into that deep, murky place where changes of minds really happen. The essay makes him to seem interested in subtley and nuance, the analog rather than the digital. But later essays, especially in the section on machines, shows him to be a more mechanical thinker, to imagine objects as reified, poetry a kind of mathematics.
At times, this works for him: his best essays are the two reviews, one ofbooks on the history of punctuation, one on slang, where this kind of thinking is applied well. His worst is a surprising defense of the card catalog compared to digital collections which seems, now, very dated, and reactionary.
Baker is curious, and that is good, but it seems almost affected--whcih may just be the slopping-back influence of his too-lightly worn erudition: he name drops, and writes as though he is in command of millions of facts, facts everybody else should know just as well as he does. The other problem is that his essays don't often end in a point--that's what he is up to, I think, relishing the journey over the destination. But we need some destination, and the charm that is supposed to make the journey more interesting is lacking--since he is not charming, but, as said above, affected.

[Sarovar · Rating 5 out of 5]

He's a genius in my opinion. These essays are both fascinating and mind-numbingly boring. Baker's commitment to his style, to his characters, or in this case, his non-fictional subjects, is unmatched. The problem is, often the reader cannot match this commitment, leading to an uncomfortable situation where you want to stop reading but the man has put so much work into this thing you feel bad doing it. Every book of his I read, my admiration grows and I humbled by how stupid I am. I haven't read all of these but I recommend the one about library card catalogs and most most definitely read probably one of favorite essays: "Books as Furniture". Oh, "The Size of Thoughts" itself is a pretty good one too.

[Stephan Ferreira · Rating 4 out of 5]

Baker is a fantastic writer. This collection is absolutely worth it just for the first few essays - including the one on model airplanes and the title essay. He simply dissects the mundane and tosses it over and over.

Also the 1994 New Yorker article, "Discards" is a terrific gem you can't find even online (unless you have a New Yorker subscription). It laments the passing of library card catalog systems for early computer catalogs. Written before Google, it highlights some interesting ideas about the loss of information from an analog format to a digital "cleaner" one.

Otherwise the other essays and articles feel like they simply needed a home and were stuck together with the rest. A good half of the page count is the essay, "Lumber" which is about exactly that.

[Isaac Lord · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I could talk the way Nicholson Baker writes, I'm well aware that I would be insufferable. But these essays are pure pleasure to read, an indulgent wallowing. His few paragraphs describing the joys of writing on rubber with a ball-point pen, followed by his regret at having cheapened this joy by decreasing its rareness with exposure in an essay-- swoon.

[jeroenT · Rating 5 out of 5]

what a great book this is. If I can find anything close to Size of thoughts I would drop everything, buy it, clear my schedule and start reading. Meticulous, engaging, funny, to the point. As if you found a friend.

[Martha · Rating 4 out of 5]

What beautiful writing--I am loving this book already!

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

“But a really large thought, a thought in the presence of which whole urban centers would rise to their feet, and cry out with expressions of gratefulness and kinship; a thought with grandeur, and drenching, barrel-scorning cataracts, and detonations of fist-clenched hope, and hundreds of cellos; a thought that can tear phone books in half, and rap on the iron nodes of experience until every blue girder rings; a thought that may one day pack everything noble and good into its briefcase, elbow past the curators of purposelessness, travel overnight toward Truth, and shake it by the indifferent marble shoulders until it finally whispers its cool assent—this is the size of thought worth thinking about.”

[R.M. Loveland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Worth reading for the essay 'Discards', which is about library card catalogs. The deficiences of online card catalogs he describes circa 1993 have only been partially fixed over the years. I miss physical card catalogs.

Bonus points awarded for use of the neologism "cardnage".

[Seth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Couldn't really get through the last essay but there were some gems in here.

[Mugren Ohaly · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book hasn’t aged well. It reads like an overwritten mediocre blog.

[Leilani Bender · Rating 3 out of 5]

Small thoughts add up to big ones?? I didn't need an essay telling me that sorry. Some of the essays are fun though

[Grant Cronin · Rating 2 out of 5]

As much as I love The Mezzanine, A Box of Matches and Vox, this just wasn't for me. Aside from 1 or 2 standout essays, it found itself too far into the literary weeds.

[Nicholas Bonnin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I spent most of it alternating between being impressed by his capabilities as a writer and being impressed by his ability to waste words.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Moreover, the pressure of the reader's nail, deformed by its momentary trenchancy, against the tender hyponychial tissues it protects, creates a transient thumbwide pleasure that is, or can be, more than literary."

"The card catalog is to them a monument, not to intergenerational intellect, but to the idea of the lowly, meek-and-mild public librarian as she exists in the popular mind. The archetype, though they know it to be cheap and false, shames them; they believe that if they are disburdened of all that soiled cardboard, they will be able to define themselves as Brokers of Information and Off-Site Digital Retrievalists instead of as shy, bookish people with due-date stamps and wooden drawers to hold the nickel-and-dime overdue fines, with 'Read to Your Child' posters over their heads and 'February is Black History Month' bookmarks at their fingertips."

"Not having to go to a library is a very important improvement in providing library service."

"When we redefine libraries as means rather than as places--as conduits of knowledge rather than as physical buildings filled with physical books--we may think that the new, more "visionary," more megatrendy definition embraces the old, but in fact it doesn't: the removal of the concrete word "books" from the library's statement of purpose is exactly the act that allows misguided administrators to work out their hostility toward printed history while the rest of us sleep."

"The fact that most library books seldom circulate is part of the mystery and power of libraries. The books are there, waiting from age to age until their moment comes."

"At universities, people get financial support if they're doing something sexy, and an awful lot of people that are running the overall library operation today are not so much reference librarians as promoters of sexy modern technique. The people who pay the bills want to get out of the stuff business. They don't want libraries to have anything in them."

"Charles Hildreth, a big name in library automation, said in a 1985 interview that comparing the card catalog to the online catalog is like comparing a bicycle to a space vehicle; they're both modes of transportation, but that's where the similarities end. And the question is: Don't both modes have characteristic and complementary virtues? Which mode do you really want to ride to school? Which is going to have the brittle O-rings? Which is costlier? Which is likelier to drift aimlessly off into outer darkness? Which would you prefer to have your fourth grader ride?"

[JA · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, I was amused by this book, but then, I have an odd sense of humor.

My first impression was: OK, he had a couple of big hits, and his agent/publisher said "Nicky boy, we gotta get something else into print while you're hot!" and so they scraped together every random essay, book review, or shopping list he'd ever written and slapped them into a book.

My later impression was: He wrote this crazy 150-page essay on the word "lumber", and couldn't get it published in any normal way, so he went to his agent/publisher and said "can't we make this into a book somehow? Oh c'mon, be a sport, my last couple of books have made heaps of money, let's give it a try!".

Who knows, maybe some of each? The contents of this volume are quite a mixed lot. I think I'd rather blame greed and/or self-indulgence than think that no one involved had better judgment.

Despite all that, I did enjoy enough parts of it to make it worth the price of admission.

He does write beautifully -- I admire his way with words even when I can't tell what he's on about. And there's something to be said for a well-written diatribe about the fate of library card catalogs -- or even obsolete uses of the word lumber.

[Ron · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of occasional essay by Baker, written for magazines here and there. A very uneven collection, with a few short exercises in extravagant style, the long "Lumber" piece about, I think, the advantages and disadvantages of using computerized data bases as scholarly research tools, and the two major pieces, about the history of punctuation (focusing on oddball uses of the comma) and the thoughtful diatribe against the disposal of library card catalogs in favor of on line search tools.
I intend to read through Baker's oeuvre, no matter what the struggle. Here, the struggle was with the "Lumber" consideration, as long and as drawn out and and full of literary minutia as he could make it. It was good to read the library card catalogue piece again. We need Cassandra like Baker to let us know just how we are fucking up our scholarly heritage in favor of "progress."
I will remember the thoroughness of his discussion of the value of card catalogs, and remember the oddity and, frankly, pointlessness of the "Lumber" essays.

[Jamie Anderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a very interesting collection. Some of the essays were ridiculously accessible. Then there were ones that were food for lots of deep thought. The essay bemoaning the loss of the card catalog was interesting. I went back and forth between shaking my head at the technophobia of the early 90's and thinking long and hard about the losses we've sustained in moving from an analog world to a digital one.

"Lumber", the second half of the book, felt at times like a psychological experiment in how long the reader would Sally forth in the reading if he really got into the DEEP exploration of a definition of a word that has fallen out of vogue. It ended kind of beautifully and it left me feeling like we'd really been on a journey together, but if I read this book again, I'd probably not read "Lumber" again

[Leslie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this book for the cover (I do that sometimes), though not the one pictured here. It featured a humble brown hat against a mint-green, matte background. And at the time I didn't know anything about Nicholson Baker. So it was purely by accident that I found some of my absolute favorite essays ("Changes of Mind," in particular).

Here is a sample: "Unless I am being unusually calculating, I don't decide to befriend someone, and it is the same way with a conviction: I slowly come to respect its counsel, to enjoy its company, to depend on it for reassurance ..."

I love the first few so much, but I always get bogged down in the "lumber" portion of the collection. Sigh. Someday I will finish it, though. I will!

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

On "Rarity" Baker philosophizes on the very nature of what makes a thing rare, and the meaning that holds for us. He says: "...rarity constitutes part of the pleasure we take in many of the things we value, how rare should we allow a rareme to remain when it is in our power to influence its frequency?"

The author eschews a radical empathy for inanimate things (such as a lesser-used couch or disliked shirt) to show what the hipster movement has perhaps best exemplified. "When it begins to exist for others, it ceases to live in us." Or, my favorite snarky line: "Contrarians trample one another to buy unfashionable socks."

[M. Sarki · Rating 1 out of 5]

I looked at every essay, read a couple, but really found nothing to want me to delve any deeper into the fellow. This guy is just not interesting to me. I do not like his personality at all, which is, for the most part, missing from the beginning of this book and quick to get a little too full of itself to the degree I was finding myself becoming nauseated beyond repair. I have since read a couple Raymond Carver short stories in order to get back to something real, something with gusto and flair.

[Christopher McCaffery · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of these essays are entertaining, some genuinely interesting, some goofy, all overcome with the joy Nicholson Baker takes in his own weird, weird brain. Except for the closing essay on Lumber, which I anticipated as just the sort of performative, bizarre PoMo thing I enjoy, but which was in fact unfinishably dull. High points are a recipe for chocolate syrup, an essay on toenail clippers, and the long section on the demise of library card catalogues.