The Size of Thoughts

by Nicholson Baker

  Nor is The Company Store alone among mail-order catalogs in giving prominence to the old or little-known work of literature. I counted thirty-six hand-me-down books, none with their original jackets on, in fifteen different settings, in the Crate & Barrel catalog for the spring of ’95. The books lie open on chairs, on hammocks, on the floor, as if whoever was reading them had left off briefly to check the status of an earth-toned lentil soup; on their pages rest studiously haphazard placeholders—a shell, a twist of ribbon, an apple, a daisy. The Crabtree & Evelyn catalog for spring offers a pair of three-and-a-half-ounce containers of Southampton Rose Home Fragrance Spray, which is a kind of highbrow air freshener, for seventeen dollars; its dignity is enhanced, and its price defended, by its placement next to a fancily bound Italian biography of Queen Elizabeth from 1965, whose title, translated, is Elizabeth I of England: The Virgin with the Iron Fist—itself not such a bad name for an air freshener. On page 28 of the spring Tweeds catalog, a woman wearing a nice cotton sweater holds open an unidentifiable clothbound book bearing visible, and quite beautiful, mildew stains. In one of the latest J. Crew catalogs, there is a literary interlude on page 33: a man in shorts and plaster-dusted work boots, sitting in a half-remodeled room—on break, apparently, from his labor of hammering and gentrifying—is looking something up in what close inspection reveals to be a Guide Bleu to Switzerland, probably from the forties, in French.

  What is it with all these books? Isn’t the Book supposed to be in decline—its authority eroding, its informational tax base fleeing to suburbs of impeccably edged and weeded silicon? Five minutes with the tasteful Pottery Barn catalog of March 1995 may be somewhat reassuring. A closed universe of about fifty books circulates decoratively in its pages. The Pottery Barn catalog’s library may have been selected for the alpha-wave-inducing beige and blue-gray and dull red of its bindings, but the actual titles, which are nearly but not quite unreadable, sometimes betray reserves of emotion. In the tranquillity of a cool living room, a cream-colored book entitled Tongues of Flame appears, minus its jacket, on a shelf of the Trestle Bookcase, near the Malabar Chair. Then it shows up in some peaceful shots of iron end tables. Next, on the page that offers what the Pottery Barn’s furniture-namers call a Library Bed—“a bed whose broad panels suggest the careful woodworking found in old English libraries”—a historical novel called A Rose for Virtue makes its quiet entrance, underneath a handsome ivory-toned telephone. Three pages later comes the big moment, the catalog’s clinch: for, lying at the foot of the Scroll Iron Bed, open facedown on the cushion of the Scroll Iron Bench, as if it were being read, is a half-hidden volume that can be positively identified as Tongues of Flame, and leaning fondly, or even ardently, against it, at a slight angle, is A Rose for Virtue. Whether the rose’s virtue survives this fleeting flammilingus, we are not told; it’s enough to know that the two books, after their photographic vicissitudes, are together at last.

  So I went to the library again, and checked out Tongues of Flame. It’s a collection of short stories, by Mary Ward Brown, which was published by Dutton in 1986. (There is also a novel called Tongues of Flame, by Tim Parks, set in England, that came out in 1985, but the large pale-gold letters on the binding of the Dutton edition are unmistakable.) The title story is about a married woman who wants to help a stuttering drunk reform his life by taking him to church. Her program seems to work at first, but one evening the preacher delivers a sermon so potent it sends the alarmed man right back to the bottle; in a matter of hours, his clumsy cigarette-smoking has set fire to the church. “Save the Bible!” hollers one of the parishioners as the flames rise from the roof, and it is eventually saved. The author writes:

  The wet pulpit, with the Bible still on it, had been brought out into the churchyard. Pews sat haphazardly about. Songbooks, Sunday School books, and Bible pictures for children were scattered on the grass.

  Were it not for the color-coordinating book lovers at Pottery Barn, I would never have read Mary Ward Brown’s short story—and it’s worth reading, more flavorful, perhaps, for having been found circuitously. Nor would I ever have troubled to determine which hymn it is that contains the simple but stirring phrase “tongues of flame.” It’s from “Father of Boundless Grace,” by the prolific Charles Wesley (Methodist, brother of John Wesley, and inspirer of William Blake), and it was probably written sometime in the 1730s:

  A few from every land

  At first to Salem came,

  And saw the wonders of Thy hand,

  And saw the tongues of flame!

  And if I hadn’t read Tongues of Flame, I might never have been reminded of the story of another, bigger book fire. It took place in London on Saturday, October 23, 1731, at two o’clock in the morning. What was to become the library of the British Museum—a set of about a thousand books and manuscripts, which included the collection of the old Royal Library, along with the fabulous accumulation of Robert Cotton—was shelved, far too casually, in a room in a house in Westminster, and was overseen (according to Edward Miller’s That Noble Cabinet) by the son of the by then aged classical scholar Richard Bentley. The room below the library caught fire; tongues of flame found their way up through the wainscoting and reached the backs of the bookcases—or book presses, as they were often called—and, as the conjoined libraries began to sigh and crackle, the Speaker of the House of Commons, who lived nearby and had hurried over when he heard the clamor, plucked warm and smoking bundles of ancient parchment off the shelves and tossed them out the window to save them. Like Chuck Yeager, smoke-smirched but ambulatory after his plane crash at the end of The Right Stuff, Dr. Bentley himself emerged from the conflagration with the Codex Alexandrinus, the priceless fifth-century manuscript of the Greek Bible, in his arms. He was dressed in his nightgown, but he had apparently taken a moment, in the name of scholarly dignity, to slap on his wig. A hundred and fourteen books were ruined or lost that night—some of them “burnt to a Crust,” many of them irreplaceable—and a number of the ones that had been flung out the window to safety were swept together into heaps of shuffled and water-damaged pages and boxed away. Librarians didn’t succeed in restoring order to some of the surviving fragments until a century later.

  And if I hadn’t been reminded of that British Museum fire I wouldn’t have been moved to reread the great book-fire scene in Mervyn Peake’s novel Titus Groan, published in 1946, which uses some of the elements from the mythical pre-history of the British Museum. Here’s how Peake describes the passing of Lord Sepulchrave’s library at Gormenghast:

  The room was lit up with a tongue of flame that sprang into the air among the books on the right of the unused door. It died almost at once, withdrawing itself like the tongue of an adder, but a moment later it shot forth again and climbed in a crimson spiral, curling from left to right as it licked its way across the gilded and studded spines of Sepulchrave’s volumes. This time it did not die away, but gripped the leather with its myriad flickering tentacles while the names of the books shone out in ephemeral glory. They were never forgotten by Fuchsia, those first few vivid titles that seemed to be advertising their own deaths.

  Fuchsia and the others escape out the window, and the next morning we view the library’s desolate remains:

  The shelves that still stood were wrinkled charcoal, and the books were standing side by side upon them, black, grey, and ash-white, the corpses of thought.

  Umberto Eco seems to have been inspired by this scene, right down to its studded book spines, and inspired, too, by the story of the British Museum fire, in writing the description of burning books which ends his big book, The Name of the Rose. “Now I saw tongues of flame [lingue di fiamma] rise from the scriptorium, which was also tenanted by books and cases,” says Eco’s narrator. And then, revisiting the ruined abbey years later, he reports:

  Poking about in the rubble, I found at times scraps of parchments that had drifted down from the scriptorium and the library and had survived like treasures buried in the earth; I began to collec
t them, as if I were going to piece together the torn pages of a book.…

  Along one stretch of wall I found a bookcase, still miraculously erect, having come through the fire I cannot say how.… At times I found pages where whole sentences were legible; more often, intact bindings, protected by what had once been metal studs.… Ghosts of books, apparently intact on the outside but consumed within.

  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 to be separated from one another; for fear they be packed so close as to injure each other or delay those who want them.”

  In English, the word “armarium” relaxed into “almery” or “aumbry,” as in this sixteenth-century account of life at Durham Cathedral:

  And over against the carrells against the church wall did stande certaine great almeries of waynscott all full of bookes, wherein did lye as well the old auncyent written Doctors of the Church as other prophane authors with dyverse other holie mens wourks, so that every one dyd studye what Doctor pleased them best.

  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 shadowy books in the picture will persist after delivery, raising the moral tone of the TV—in other words, that the armoire’s bookish past will give the TV a liberal education.

  It’s undeniable that books furnish a room, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. They require furniture, in the form of bookshelves, but they are themselves furniture as well. “No furniture so charming as books, even if you never open them, or read a single word”—so Sydney Smith, one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review, and a devoted Victorian reader, told his daughter as they had breakfast in his library. By chance, the book immediately to the right of The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus where I found it in the library was something called Bits of Talk, in Verse and Prose, for Young Folks, published in 1892, by Helen Jackson. She devotes a chapter to tips on making rooms pleasant to live in. She recommends sunlight first, and then color, especially the color red:

  In an autumn leaf, in a curtain, in a chair-cover, in a pin-cushion, in a vase, in the binding of a book, everywhere you put it, it makes a brilliant point and gives pleasure.

  She goes on:

  Third on my list of essentials for making rooms cosey, cheerful, and beautiful, come—Books and Pictures. Here some persons will cry out: “But books and pictures cost a great deal of money.” Yes, books do cost money, and so do pictures; but books accumulate rapidly in most houses where books are read at all; and if people really want books, it is astonishing how many they contrive to get together in a few years without pinching themselve
s very seriously in other directions.

  Hunca Munca and Tom Thumb, the Two Bad Mice in Beatrix Potter, try their best to maneuver a dollhouse bookcase holding a faux Encyclopædia Britannica, bound in red, into their mousehole, but it doesn’t quite fit. At the age of eighty and between Prime Ministerships, William Gladstone became fascinated with the problems of book storage, and during a visit to All Souls College, Oxford, he “launched out on his theme one evening in the Common Room,” in the words of one observer, “and illustrated his scheme of bookshelves by an elaborate use of knives, forks, glasses, and decanters.” Gladstone was not entirely sure how England was going to shelve all the books it produced without its citizens’ being, as he writes, “extruded some centuries hence into the surrounding waters by the exorbitant dimensions of their own libraries.” But one thing Gladstone was sure of: bookcases should be plain. “It has been a fashion to make bookcases highly ornamental,” he says. “Now books want for and in themselves no ornament at all. They are themselves the ornament.”

  Books are themselves the ornament. A tenth-century Arabic-speaking scholar learned the truth of this proposition as he was browsing in the book bazaar in Córdoba, Spain. Córdoba was a literary capital; it held what was then the largest library in the world. Our scholar (whose name I don’t know) was looking for a particular manuscript that he hadn’t yet been able to find for sale. Finally, to his inexpressible joy, he came across a copy, written in an unusually fine script. He bid for it eagerly. “But,” he writes,