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“... put learned culture, they’ve also carved out a general readership for themselves – witness Nicholson Baker on card catalogues – and joined forces with groups slighted by literary theorists: librarians, book dealers, local historians. Even the form of The Book History Reader privileges empirical case studies over theoretical ...”

“... connoisseurship and defiant frankness. This qualm was both expressed and lightly lampooned by Nicholson Baker, writing in U&I: ‘Hey, I’m reading Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library, and you know, once you get used to the initially kind of disgusting level of homosexual sex, which quickly becomes really interesting as a kind of ...”

“... the process in the finished volume is a matter of rhetoric. It was a different thing when Nicholson Baker, writing about his literary relationship with John Updike in U & I, decided not to reread Updike’s work, or to read for the first time the books he hadn’t finished (or hadn’t started). That was a piquant part of the book’s ...”

“... then comes Herbert Chitepo, named after an African leader martyred in the struggle. To the south, Baker and Speke intrude between Samora Machel and Mugabe. Since those two famous explorers never came anywhere near the territory formerly known as Southern Rhodesia, their continued invocation in the centre of decolonised Harare is remarkable testimony to the ...”

“... like printed books. Even computer people enjoy printed books.’) There is none of the urgency of Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (2001), which lambasts librarians (two words not often found together) for destroying printed texts in order to preserve them. Fears about space and the fragility of books, particularly ...”