Baking powder, it turns out, is just baking soda, salt and cream of tartar. It’s so simple. Factual black type.

Lucas is going through a book with a curious aesthetic, one he’s seen before but never seen defined. The photographs are of excellent quality, but somehow sterile: they float shadowless on white fields, on the smell of acid-free matte paper. He remembers reading in similar books about ocean liners, leopards, uses of St. John’s Wort.

What a nice dream, to have everything in books: flat and clear; deliberately spaced; written well and concisely. To be able to learn anything there is.