On the floor between them sits a sculpture by Roni Horn, a weighty volume of solid black glass the size and shape of a bass drum, with a top so shiny that it looks like liquid ink.
"The Poetry of Pablo Neruda" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $40), edited by Ilan Stavans, a professor of Latin-American and Latino culture at Amherst College, is a weighty volume of almost a thousand pages, including an informative introduction, a bibliography of translations into English of Neruda's work, and notes on his life and his poetry.
This chapter is designed to help non-English speaking scientists to go beyond the knowledge in the weighty volumes of grammar from which they learned, translate their scientific results into clear contemporary English, write articles suitable for publication, present their ideas at conferences, and maintain their joy of life.
Constable, the independent British publisher that brought out the weighty volume, exhausted its first print run of 5,000 in just a month, while a special edition, priced at £650 ($1,311), sold out before it was even ready to be shipped.The compiler, Fred Buller, an 81-year-old former fishing-tackle salesman, reminds readers of the salmon's romantic, if brutish, life story.
The weighty volume in my holiday book bag is Careless People, Sarah Churchwell's enticing survey of "Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby".
The bright waiting-room, with its walls bare of credentials and weighty volumes, might belong to one of those handsome "quacks" (so dear to the hearts of novel-readers) who stroke their thinning hair and flatter you into feeling better.
The latest edition of "Tolley's Yellow Tax Handbook", which contains all direct-tax legislation for 2005-06, runs to four weighty volumes and has roughly doubled in length since Gordon Brown became chancellor of the exchequer in 1997.
Modigliani's superb way with line, which establishes not only shapes but weighty volumes, can seem a surrogate for yet more effectual action with a chisel; and the sameness of faces, as he rendered them, is less disheartening in three dimensions than in two.
There's the weighty and warm century-old volume of Whitman's prose I found at the gruffly charming Allan Elsner's charmed little store on First Avenue in the fifties, and the two-volume brick-like paperbacks of Kierkegaard's "Either/Or" that turned up on one of the six rickety, labyrinthine floors of the ancient Isaac Mendoza bookshop near City Hall.
The third volume of his "Quantum Theory of Fields," a weighty work on matter and energy at its most fundamental levels, is soon to be released by Cambridge University Press.
