My research library was in a shipping container twenty yards away—one of thirty rented out for self-storage. I got the steel 8-by-8-by-40-foot space for $250 a month and spent all of $1,000 fixing it up with white paint, cheap carpet, lights, an old couch, and raw plywood work surfaces and shelves. It was heaven. To go in there was to enter the book-in-progress—all the notes, tapes, 5 × 8 cards, photos, negatives, magazines, articles, 450 books, and other research oddments laid out by chapters or filed carefully. When the summer sun made it too hot for work, I sawed a vent in the wood floor,
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