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Book Cover for: The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber, Nicholson Baker

The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber

Nicholson Baker

Paperback
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Novelist Nicholson Baker, author of The Mezzanine and Vox and called by Vanity Fair "the best American writer of his generation, " here collects over a decade's worth of essays and journalism, including his controversial and highly praised 1994 article on the destruction of library card catalogs. His subjects range from the internals of the movie projector to the emotional tribulations of reading aloud; from the disappearance of hybrid punctuation to the mechanics of changing one's mind; from the lexicography of dirty talk to the manufacture of the fingernail clipper. There is a wedding address, a study of the not-so-random books that are used as props in mail-order catalogs, and a recipe. The final essay, which appears in print here for the first time, pursues through several centuries of prose and poetry the vagaries of the word lumber as a metaphor for the contents of the human mind, in what becomes in the telling a dazzlingly pedantic case study of the fanaticism of scholarship and the beauty that can reside within a piece of ordinary language.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
  • Publish Date: Feb 25th, 1997
  • Pages: 368
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.02in - 5.26in - 0.79in - 0.68lb
  • EAN: 9780679776246
  • Categories: • Essays• Literary

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About the Author

Nicholson Baker has published five novels-The Mezzanine, Room Temperature, Vox, The Fermata, and The Everlasting Story of Nory-and two works of nonfiction, U and I and The Size of Thoughts. He lives with his wife and two children in Maine.

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What people are saying

Mentioner image for: ryan teague beckwith
ryan teague beckwith
@ryanbeckwith
2 years

Politics reporter at @Bloomberg. Part-time journalism teacher at @hoyajournalism. Isaiah 8:12. RTs≠RTBs. Opinions: © Ryan Teague Beckwith

@emilyfmaloney you should read Nicholson Baker's "The Size of Thoughts" essay

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Mentioner image for: Chris Aldrich
Chris Aldrich
@ChrisAldrich
2 years

Biomedical Engineer https://t.co/QxutCuVBSM #IndieWeb, education, information theory, math, mnemotechny, history (he/him) @chrisaldrich@boffosocko.com

@thehighpony @Extended_Brain @JKattnis @soenke_ahrens @zsviczian @TfTHacker @obsdmd @bianca_oli_per Nicholson Baker had some interesting input on the topic in "The Size of Thoughts": https://t.co/HLznODFH3b https://t.co/k711dPLrcv

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Mentioner image for: Jonathan Hoefler
Jonathan Hoefler
@JonathanHoefler
2 years

Typeface designer. Founder, director emeritus of Hoefler&Co → https://t.co/ESbcRhmXLj The Netflix documentary → https://t.co/TQNpnALhRh Typographer to Biden-Harris → https://t.co/2dWg5myRGw

@celiason If you haven’t yet, read Nicholson Baker’s essay about punctuation in “The Size of Thoughts,” in which he postulates such things and then convincingly sneaks them in.

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