In both his fiction and nonfiction, American author Nicholson Baker pays extraordinary attention to the small details of everyday life--"things that you don't notice when you're noticing them." His first novel, The Mezzanine (1988), concerns the observations of a man riding an escalator after buying shoelaces on his lunch hour. In this footnote from Chapter Nine, Baker (or rather the book's narrator, Howie) celebrates the miraculous qualities of perforation in an unconventional encomium.

Nicholson Baker's Encomium to Perforation

Passage from The Mezzanine*

Perforation! Shout it out! The deliberate punctuated weakening of paper and cardboard so that it will tear along an intended path, leaving a row of fine-haired white pills or tuftlets on each new edge! It is a staggering conception, showing an age-transforming feel for the unique properties of pulped-wood fiber. Yet do we have national holidays to celebrate its development? Are festschrift volumes published honoring the dead greats in the field? People watch the news every night like robots thinking they are learning about their lives, never paying attention to the far more immediate developments that arrive unreported, on the zip-lock perforated top of the ice cream carton, in reply coupons bound in magazines and on the "Please Return This Portion" edging of bill stubs, on sheets of postage stamps and sheets of Publishers Clearing House magazine stamps, on paper towels, in rolls of plastic bags for for produce at the supermarket, in strips of hanging file-folder labels.

The lines dividing one year from another in your past are perforated, and the mental sensation of detaching a period of your life for closer scrutiny resembles the reluctant guided tearing of a perforated seam. The only educational aspect of the Ginn series of grade-school readers was the perforated tear-out pages in their workbooks: after you tore out the page (folding it back and forth over the line first to ready it for its rending), a little flap was left bound in the workbook that told the teacher in tiny sideways type what that page was meant to teach the student: the page I remember from first grade was a picture of Jack standing with a red wagon at the top left, and Spot waiting for him on the lower right, with a dotted line in a large Z shape connecting the two. The instructions were "Make Jack take the wagon to Spot," or something like that--and you clearly were not supposed to take the diagonal route, but rather were meant to travel this pointless Z with your crayon. The sideways explanation in the grown-up side of the perforation claimed that the Z path taught the child the ideal motion of the reading eyeballs--one line of type, a zag of a cartridge return, another line of type. I scorned the exercise only a little, because the dotted line itself was like the dotted line printed over perforations in reply coupons and intrinsically beautiful, despite the boy and dog at either end. I was taught, later, about the Indians of New York State, about Harriet Tubman and George Washington Carver and Susan B. Anthony--why don't I have any clear idea now, after years of schooling, how the perforation of the reply coupon or the roll of toilet paper is accomplished? My guesses are pitiable! Circular pizza cutters, with diamond-tipped radii? Zirconium templates, fatally sharp to the touch, stamping the paper with their barbed braillery? Why isn't the pioneer of perforation chiseled into the façades of libraries, along with Locke, Franklin, and the standard bunch of French Encyclopedists? They would have loved him! They would have devoted a whole page of beautifuilly engraved illustration, with "fig. 1's" and "fig. 2's," to the art.

Selected Works by Nicholson Baker

• The Mezzanine, novel (1988)
• Room Temperature, novel (1990)
• U and I: A True Story, nonfiction (1991)
• Vox, novel (1992)
• The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber, nonfiction (1996)
• Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, nonfiction (2001)
• A Box of Matches, novel (2003)
• Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, nonfiction (2008)

* The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker was originally published by Weidenfeld and Nicholson in 1988 and reprinted in paperback by Vintage in 1990.