[In the following review, Korn offers a generally positive assessment of The Size of Thoughts, though criticizes the inclusion of several unworthy pieces in the volume.]

After the entertaining phonoerotic Vox and the deplorable Fermata (which gave a new, literalist interpretation to the cry, “Stop the world, I want to get off”), Nicholson Baker, to the relief of the rest of us, has turned his hand elsewhere. He is a man of enormous lexical talent, a talent recently deployed largely to describe underwear; and so clinging is literary repute or ill-fame that when he published his deeply researched and deeply felt tirade (philippic, jeremiad, dithyramb) on the subject of the deaccession (as in “at yesterday's auto-da-fé, sixteen Jews and three Lutherans were deaccessioned”) of card catalogues as libraries the world over constructed classificatory castles in cyberspace (or cyberspain), readers everywhere paused, decided that they must have misheard, and attributed the piece to the blameless Nicolas Barker, of the British Library and Book Collector, who was obliged to pen a pendant article, which would win him a place in any collection of literary disavowals, along with H. G. Wells grumpily protesting that he is not George Meek and Cruikshank scrawling “Nothing to do with me!” across falsely attributed cartoons.

This is reprinted here, [in The Size of Thoughts,] together with a fine, massive piece, two-fifths of the whole book, on the various roots, meanings and usages of the word “lumber”, which meanders with a mazy motion through many pleasant places, before revealing itself as a precisely machined, and closely argued review of the Chadwyck-Healey CD-ROM English Poetry Full Text Database, four shiny discs that hold an astonishingly large portion of the glory (and a good deal of the dross) of English poetry, which “promises, and moreover delivers, something like 4,500 volumes of liquidly, intimately friskable poetry”, as Baker notably describes it.

“Lumber”, astonishingly, runs back, at least in part, to “long-beard” (or possibly “long-axe”); the hirsute Langobardi became the more subtle Lombards, who bought unwanted goods from the financially distressed, and stored them in Lombard-houses, or lumber-rooms. It's all Lombard Street to a china orange that the pawnbrokers didn't mind laying up other folks' treasures; but people who found their private store-rooms filling up with miscellaneous goods felt burdened, encumbered, lumbered.

The lumbering gait of a bear or a rambling, rumbling drunk may relate to a Swedish verb, a Swedish dialect verb at that, denoting, perhaps onomatopoetically, a noise, as in Skelton's wondrous “he lumbryth on a lewde lewte, roty bully joyse, rumbyll downe, rumbyll downe”. This has nothing to do with the Lombards, for “lumber” is one of those delightful unbiological lexemes that has several disparate parents, promiscuously blended. And “lumber” as timber seems to be American in origin, therefore outside the Chadwyck-Healey database. This is one of many lacunae—no poems by those classified as prose-writers, hence no Johnson, no Scott, no Charlotte or Anne Brontë.

It would be hard to find a better example of the inadequacy of Chadwyck-Healey's criteria (of any human criteria, and a fortiori any machine criteria, if the machines have been invented and employed by humans) than the omission of John Henry, Cardinal Newman (Dream of Gerontius, “Lead, Kindly Light”, “Praise to the Holiest in the Height”), and the inclusion of his interesting brother, the polymath, freethinking and, to be candid, marginally dotty Francis. The mechanical criterion is that John Henry is essentially a setter-up of prose monuments, a stele-driving man, while Francis frequently puts his scholarship in rhyme (there is a long book about theism, largely in hexameters) and counts as a poet, or rather what a computer would recognize as POET—including poetess, poetaster, poetic disaster and so forth. What is impressive about both the Chadwyck-Healey and the Catalogue-card essays is Baker's revelling, joyful familiarity with the technology which threatens what it claims to preserve. We need such non-Luddite guardians of the past, techno-Greens.

Other essays demonstrate Baker's versatility. His essay on model aircraft kits and their place in the history of ideas is a loving, elaborate and fairly convincing exercise in techno-mannerism, the Higher Nerdery; as is his monograph on nail-clippers, though he doesn't draw attention to the most striking everyday example of the cultural phenomenon of sciomorphism: the outer limb of the clipper frequently bears a non-functional pattern of incised lines, representing the suppressed nail file, as the earliest thrown pots were decorated with the pattern of twisted twigs.

Baker is sometimes frugal. If, improbably, the New Yorker were to write to me enclosing a ＄100 bill and asking for some bargain writing, I might also be inclined, supposing I had such a thing, to send them a few haphazard pages written under the influence of large quantities of marijuana—which give the lie more effectually than the whole canon of 1960s literature to the myth of potwit. But I doubt I would be so shameless as to reprint it in hardback. Another facile article simply reprints, as found poetry, his outtakes, the terminal moraine of sentence debris that accumulates at the foot of the word-processed page if you don't delete misspellings but simply push them forward. Baker's speech at his sister's wedding shows a delicate fraternal feeling but has no other merit.

He has no need for this. Hugely literate and with a promiscuous, if not actually incontinent, love of words, and a fine Dumptyish ability to make them perform tricks for him, he is more impressive when he has a subject. He employs a massive and multifarious vocabulary for the variety of jobs he has to do, like one of those 285-piece toolboxes advertised in the back of Sports Illustrated or the folksier scandal magazines (in among the pheromones and the handcuffs and the lucky Lourdes rosary at a miraculously low price): huge wrenches for wrestling the wheels off transcontinental rigs, multi-purpose adjectives for a hundred jobs about the home, tiny, purpose-built predicates for delicately tweaking a clause.

And what a lot of jobs not-just-a-pretty-face Baker finds to do about the house! Not just good at sex, he can do technical, lexical and critical (movie projectors, regional slang, Alan Hollinghurst); to say nothing of technical-critical, lexical-technical and technical-lexical-critical. Wistfully returning his review copy of EPFTD (even the most puissants critics don't get one to keep), Baker finds dazzling metaphors from the kitchen and the alimentary canal: “one book after another I have sliced in half and jammed down on the juicing hub—at times my roistered brain-shaft has groaned like a tiny electric god in pain with the effort of noshing and filtering all this verbal pulp”. This is life-enhancing stuff, but I'm not certain it is zoologically sound. Noshers are not gnashers: the baleen whale, the leopard and the scallop all, in their different ways, filter their food before noshing it, as do the newly discovered creatures that dwell on lobster bristles; and so, I suspect, do even the most sensual lexicographers.