Nicholson Baker

I pitched a piece recently explaining that I wanted to approach the topic in question the way Nicholson Baker or Henry Petroski might. The editor is interested, so I decided to refresh my memory of Baker's writing. I love his obsessive attention to the minutiae that surrounds us everyday, but I had forgotten just how good a writer he is. You can find a number of his best essays in The Size of Thoughts. "The History of Punctuation" is the one I lit upon for a Nicholson Baker refresher course, but I thought about using "Books as Furniture."