For the young writer starting out, Borges observes in Evaristo Carriego  (1930), "a book is not an expression or a chain of expressions but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular faces which is made up of thin sheets of paper" and a number of other standard features, the front matter being prominent among them. The notion of the book as an object is appealing for its emphasis on physicality, for holding something that is a symbol of the value of one's efforts, if not of one's out-right success, is surely a part of the pleasure of having published for the first time. I have witnessed that pleasure, listening to a poet comment on her being able to flip through pages rather than sheets of typing paper during a reading that she gave shortly after her first collection appeared. The smile on her face as she made the observation, while not quite a grin, expressed a joy that had very little to do with the convenience that the bound object in her hand afforded. Such joy, however, is rarely what writers reminisce about when they look back on their initial forays into authorship. First books are often remembered as solutions to problems, both financial and artistic.

Take the example of John Barth, who is celebrating his 79th birthday this week. The story of his first novel has very little to do with the physical book that his publisher produced. At the age of 24, a master's degree in hand, he was teaching at Penn State and had already completed two manuscripts that weren't going to find a publisher. He also had three children and a salary fit for a bachelor. Without publications or a doctorate, he wouldn't be able to fashion a decent academic career, so his best option at that point in his life was to resign his position and head back to graduate school, a move that would have meant further deprivation for his family. By the spring semester of the 1954-55 academic year, Barth had a spot in the Ph.D. program at John Hopkins secured for the fall, but he had something else, a season to try his hand at another novel.

During the spring semester, he drafted The Floating Opera  (1956), the idea for which came from a photograph of Captain James Adams's Original Floating Theater, a theater that he had actually seen as a child, and what he has described as a basic knowledge of French existentialism. The problem of form, Barth claims, was solved by Joaquin Machado de Assis, a Brazilian novelist whose work had been influenced by Laurence Stern's Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, a book Barth asserts he had not yet read.[1] The draft he had written seemed more promising to him than his previous attempts at novels, and he proceeded to edit it over the summer, deciding not to take his place at John Hopkins in the fall and to continue teaching as his book made the rounds of editors' desks. He also drafted his second novel, The End of the Road.

In the beginning of 1956, The Floating Opera found a publisher--though its original ending had to be rewritten. (It was restored for the 1967 reprint.) That did not immediately solve Barth's financial problems; advances were small in those days and sales, while acceptable, were not extraordinary. The book, however, provided Barth with more security within academia and relieved him of the problem of having to figure out how to support his family while he worked toward a Ph.D., something he had again planned to begin doing in the fall. The Floating Opera, for Barth, represents an ability to solve aesthetic problems with which he had been struggling and avoid giving up the notion of becoming a fiction writer. For him, at least according to the story he tells, the text and career is what was important. Barth doesn't mentioned the six-sided prisms that arrived at his home in the form of author copies in 1956, but keeping private the elation that he possibly felt, assuming he finally felt it--relief was what he says he experienced when his agent called him to tell him about an offer being made for his manuscript--does not negate the value of Borges's remark for the young or, for that matter, more mature writer.

Stephen King--to take another example of an author whose first book solved major problems in his life, much more so than The Floating Opera did for Barth, as King made $200,000 from the sale of the paperback rights to Carrie , that is, 50% of what the publisher was paid, before the hardcover was even close to the production stage--also doesn't discuss holding his first novel in his hand. The focus of King's recollection has been his elation over finally succeeding and the independence he gained after the paperback rights were bought. King, nevertheless, left his first publisher, Doubleday, after his fourth book was released because, among other things, he was unhappy with the production values of the objects it made: "They have a ragged, machine-produced look to them, as though they were built to fall apart," he once complained. The text printed on the thin sheets of paper may be more important than those sheets, but old fashioned as it sounds, holding a six-sided object, whether that object bears your name or someone else's, is a pleasure that goes hand in hand with the experience of reading.

 [1] I find the statement dubious, since The Floating Opera, which I read before Stern, immediately came to mind when reading Tristram Shandy. I suspect Barth, when writing about the books that influenced his novel, took the opportunity to tell people to read Machado de Assis, particularly Epitaph of A Small Winner, Philosopher or Dog?, and Dom Casmurro.