In an album quilt, the blocks differ, each from all the others. The passages that follow here seem to call for such a title. They are taken from writing I have done that has not previously appeared in any book. Getting this project under way, I looked through pieces written for both public and private occasions through the years, and selected a passage here and there. These included a number of short New Yorker pieces, and stories of varied length from other magazines and from Time, where I worked before I joined The New Yorker. I looked through some dozens of things I wrote when I was in college, and threw them all out. In aggregate, I sifted about two hundred and fifty thousand words and got rid of seventy-five per cent. I didn’t aim to reprint the whole of anything. Instead, I was looking for blocks to add to the quilt, and not without new touches, internal deletions, or changed tenses—trying to make something, not just preserve it, and hoping the result would be engaging to read.
With fifty-six three-by-five cards on a large smooth table, I reached an arrangement of passages in an intentionally various, random, and subjective manner. I meant that they should be read that way—all at once, or, say, half a dozen pages after a crack of the book.
DESIGNER’S NOTE: The crossed-canoe blocks on this and the following pages are from a paper pieced quilt made by Cass Garner, of Stockton, New Jersey, as a gift to John McPhee.