ISAIAH BERLIN famously grouped people into two categories - hedgehogs and foxes. The former are those who know only one big thing, whereas the latter know many little things.
By that analysis, Nicholson Baker is decidedly a fox. He knows, for example, the pleasure of writing on rubber with a ballpoint pen, and the secret of the "Geneva movement", the ingenious device which pulls film frame by frame: through the gate of every movie projector.
More: Mr Baker knows more than is good for him about the design and manufacture of toe nail clippers. He can tell you about the relative modernity of the semi colon, and explain that "eagle shit" is military slang for the gold ornamentation which adorns the visor of a senior officer's cap. He can squeeze a tube of Airfix modelling glue and go into reheat as an "art blob of cooling poison would silently ensphere itself at the machine's metal tip, looking, with its sharp gnomonic surface highlights and distilled, vodkal interior purity, like a self contained world of incorruptible mental concentration, the voluptuously pantographed miniaturisation of the surrounding room, and the artist's rendering on the Monogram top and the half built fighter itself, along with the hands that now reached to complete it ..." Contd. p94, as they say. In fact, the sentence continues for another 56 words before it collides with a full stop like a train hitting the buffers.
None of which will come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Mr Baker's fiction, for he first established himself with a couple of novels (The Mezzanine and Room Temperature) which were startling in their solipsistic indulgence and their obsession with the minutiae of life. Other writers might dispense with a government or a hero's life in a paragraph, but Mr Baker's fictional characters took two pages just to tie a shoe lace.
This obsessionalism - initially intriguing, later tiresome, as in Vox and The Fermata - has limitations as a fictional device. In non fiction, however it has its uses as a motor for curiosity. This is why some of the essays in The Size of Thoughts work quite well: they are driven by a desire to find out exactly how something works and in the process explain something really interesting. "The Projector", for example, opens with a mediation on portrayals of cinema projectionists in Hollywood movies, goes on to wonder why the projection arrangements in these films is always incorrect and winds up explaining the complicated "platter" system with which movies are nowadays projected. In the process, the reader comes to appreciate the way these arrangements effectively de skill the projectionist - and transform the economics of so called "multiplex" cinemas.
The essays cover a wide range, from idiosyncratic indulgences ("Changes of Mind", "The Size of Thoughts", "Rarity") to an interminable piece of cod scholarship on the incidence of the term "lumber" in English poetry, and a charming off cut, "Mlack", produced by printing the verbal detritus which collects at the bottom of his word processor's screen. (I was puzzled by this until it dawned on me that Baker is one of those authors who create space when revising simply by hitting carriage return).
Concealed in the interstices between these ephemera are a few gems. "Books as Furniture is an inquiry into the volumes used as backdrops in furniture catalogues and "lifestyle" magazines. Baker, magnifying glass in hand, identifies one of these volumes, tracks it down in a library and then follows the train of thought started by this discovery.
The best piece in the collection is "Discards", an inquiry into the contemporary mania for replacing library card catalogues with computerised database systems. In true Baker fashion, it opens with a detailed description of the process by which the big American libraries (and, interestingly enough, Queen's University, Belfast) converted their records into bytes, and then goes on to inquire what is irreparably lost in the process.
Quite a lot, it transpires, is lost - and not just in ease of use. For the card catalogue of a great library, with its heavily annotated and revised cards, is something rather more than a list of books and periodicals, just as an old diary is more than a record of appointments kept and missed. Of all the universities which have junked their cards, only Harvard had the sense to microfilm them before consigning them to the shredder. And without Mr Baker's inexhaustible passion for detail we would never have known that. For such small mercies he deserves some thanks.