I became interested in making books, starting about 1965, when I did the Serial Project #1, deciding that I needed a small book to show how the work could be understood and how the system worked.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The first book I did - the first successful book - was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.
It felt like the first thing, but when I first started out, I got a job adapting a book by Russell Banks called 'Rule Of The Bone.' I didn't do a very good job. I didn't really know what I was doing in general, let alone how to adapt a book.
I worked in publishing before I became an author, so I knew how a book gets made.
We had to figure out how to produce books in a cost-effective way.
I grew up in a house with very few books.
Each book first begins with a little idea.
From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books. Pleased with the 'Pilgrim's Progress,' my first collection was of John Bunyan's works in separate little volumes.
I collect books, primarily first-edition 20th-century fiction.
The first book really was kind of an entertaining textbook for the homemaker. I couldn't find a good book about entertaining in 1982, and neither could my friend, so I decided to write it.
When I began, I thought that the way one should work was to do all the research and then write the book.