For 75 cents, I get 18 minutes. It is, I have determined, about the minimum I need. For 3 quarters, or a small handful of dimes and nickels, if I am lucky and have some I can put to use, thus saving the precious quarters for laundry, I can park my car outside the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library for three tenths of an hour. Every minute will count, so I am careful to select the spot nearest the entrance, and by the time the last coin has fallen into the meter I am already on the move, a left-handed batter leaving the box early on a drag bunt.

I used to think I could get by on 15 minutes, but the library is large and oddly designed—I will have to go down one floor before I can go up two, and traverse foyers and atria—and I now know that this is not enough, not worth the creeping dread I will feel as time expires with me still southeast of the information desk. Even 18 may not be enough, but there is the sense that it has to do, so I’m up the wheelchair ramp and breaking the plane of the entrance in full stride, hitched briefly by automatic doors that never quite make good on their promise of continuous passage. (One day, the mechanism will be out of service, and I will crash grandly through the front doors of the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library, and then I will go back to buying my books for a time.)

Inside, I am all hypotenuses and banked turns. I angle hard across the endless main hall, bending my torso around obstacles so I needn’t break the line of my feet. Then, arms pumping banisters, it’s up two twisting stairways to Nonfiction, where I have my first appointment, Nonfiction being complexly organized, and thus requiring advance card catalog research. If I did not look up nonfiction in advance, I would have to spend 90 cents on the meter, and that is too much.

Collections of essays and memoirs w/ literary merit gained, I shed altitude, bearing down on Fiction in a handsomely managed freefall. Here, time will slip away from me, I know this now, have made some peace with it. Nonfiction is in code, but Fiction is all too legible, and though I come in with a plan, it becomes obvious that Ba - Bi will contain Baker, and for that matter Barker, and all around me loom these siren duets of alphabet [1].

I escape by necessity—my arms are full, and I am at 15 minutes before I even reach self-checkout, which is exactly why I need 18 minutes when I make a trip to the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library. Of course, I am also now slowed by the books, twice as many as I thought I’d have, and I am slowed further by indecision in how to carry them. Like Pnin in Nabokov’s slim Pnin, which I once found a place for under my arm in this building, I’m made imperfect by a vision of perfection, in seeking the ideal spot for my lecture notes I forget which one I settled on; I squander time in a vestibule as I try to make my load more manageable.

I slow only when my windshield appears, then melt goods into the interior of my vehicle. I have a ticket or I don’t. My reading list has congealed. Information gathers itself, I gather myself, we head out.

[1] I have been having a problem. I cannot seem to escape the B’s—the B section of authors at the San Francisco Public Library. I know who to blame for this: it is Nicholson Baker. The trouble started about a month ago, when I checked out The Mezzanine from the main branch. The novel was delicious, pithy, tightly wound—a charming book, but more critically an ideal library book. Wanting to repeat the experience, I returned to chip away at the Baker chronology; I claimed Room Temperature, then The Fermata, and soon I will be heading back for more.

The problem is not Baker himself [2]. The problem is that, as long as Baker lasts, the B’s last, because whenever I am onsite I get caught up in Nicholson’s near neighbors—the Pat Barkers and the Julian Barneses and the John Barths of the stacks. The Bolanos and the Brautigans. Even in the library’s satellite branches—the secondary Marina (a modern, nobly stocked outlet), or the tertiary Golden Gate Valley (a classically inviting but small hall of books, seemingly cut from someone’s manse)—I cannot seem to make any lateral progress. I noticed a Martin Amis book the other week and it appeared lurid and foreign. My eyes adjust to the width of whatever shelves they’re presented with.

And so they adjust to the width of the worlds of the B-beginning authors. Because this cycle can’t really end with Baker: it is sustained by all fine B literature. A good Barker novel begets the hunt for another, and return trips see the accretion of all manner of Boyles and Barthelmes. As long as B’s impress, they reproduce. I have a vision of the last B book in the world, or anyway in the circulation of the San Francisco Public Library, sitting alone on the shelf. It is the only one whose quality doesn’t matter, because there’s nowhere left to go, nothing to come back for.

[2] The problem, in a fundamental way, is Nicholson Baker. Look at how he channels Nabokov’s essentialism, his synesthesiac habits. In my latest rental, the 1996 essay and lumber collection The Size of Thoughts, he writes, “Each thought has a size, and most are about three feet tall, with the level of complexity of a lawnmower engine, or a cigarette lighter, or those tubes of toothpaste that, by mingling several hidden pastes and gels, create a pleasantly striped product.” Ideas have a thingness; notation marks give off a smell. To confront the B’s mid-Baker is to disbelieve you could be around them by happenstance, but rather to see a lifestyle in a letter. B’s are not simply distinct from L’s: they are different from them, evince different values and value systems.

In Speak, Memory, Nabokov himself wrote that a B “has the tone called burnt sienna by painters.” I may disagree, but the more B’s I check out, the more I believe in his premise. I notice a B’s blend of firmness and pliancy. It tends to be pleasingly banal as the opening of an English name (Barnes), full of panache in the American West (Brautigan), and propulsive in Spanish (Bolano). The b is the crucial letter in Nabokov’s own name, providing the torque needed for the k’s brusque finish.

As it happens, this brings up an important point. Nabokov was actually writing about the b, not the B, and knowing him as we do, it’s hard to imagine this distinction not being so critical as to ruin any ideas about burnt sienna. In fact, we have no idea what he thought of the B, unless he says something about it in a different book, one located somewhere in the N section of the San Francisco Public Library [3].

[3] I’m not sure what to think about the general N, but I’ve been pushed by circumstance to consider one particular n, related inevitably to the persistent B. Recently I checked out, from the Golden Gate Valley branch, an omnibus containing Trout Fishing in America, The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar. A few days later, I noticed that its spine read “F Brautiga.” The absence of the final letter had a strange, enchanting effect. Richard’s name seemed to live somewhere between Perugia and rutabaga. Part Italian, part root vegetable. And of course, I focused on that lost n to a degree I never would have if it had stayed put.

When he wrote about a, Nabokov split his atoms even further than usual: “The long a of the English alphabet has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French a evokes polished ebony.” Surely he would be as picky with the letter n, given his personal familiarity with the 14th letter. Forget even the capitalized initial of Nabokov; an unassuming n ended his youthful handle, the writing surname Sirin, which he used before he became famous. Vladimir on Brautiga: What, one wonders, would the Russian say about n’s that exist only in the mind? What color is the ghost of a letter?