In The Dot and the Line the question was, “who is it for?” And I never know when I write books who they’re for. They’re mostly for me. I write them because I think an idea is interesting or funny or whatever, but it just seems to work. And I know an idea is good because I want to work on it. If it’s an idea that I don’t want to work on, then it’s no good. Maybe good for someone else, but it’s not for me. And even when “The Phantom Tollbooth” came out, everybody was convinced it wasn’t a children’s book at all. It was too difficult. It was too, the ideas were things that kids wouldn’t connect with. The puns and wordplay they wouldn’t understand. But then every book of mine is that, and that same question is asked. And finally, again, Michael, my editor now, when I brought “The Odious Ogre” in he answered, he asked the first question, who’s it for?
And I went through the whole thing again. And a day or two later, he called me and he said, “you know, it doesn’t really matter.” He said, “every one of your books is the same way and you can’t say, who’s it for?” And that’s what I like. As far as I’m concerned, books are for whoever wants to read them. I think The Dot and the Line started as just a little idea, vaguely influenced by a character I knew at about that time who was a friend, not a close friend, but someone I knew who was outrageous and did all the kinds of things I wished I was able to do when I was that age, in my twenties. And he was a terrible person. He did everything he shouldn’t do. He was untrustworthy. He wasn’t particularly honest. He was, had terrible manners. He dressed like an unmade bed. And yet whenever we went anyway, he was always the one that ended up with a girl.
And I never had the nerve to do any of the things that he did. And he was always in the back of my mind as the squiggle. I, of course, was the line. I had no idea who the dot was, but she could be any one of the innumerable, idealized figures that I knew I’d never get to first base with. And the thing just started to form as a little story. And I just loved the way it was going. I wrote it very quickly. It didn’t take me more than a week or two to write it. And then I said to myself, “oh my goodness. How am I going to illustrate this?” I couldn’t think, you can’t give a book like this to an illustrator. And there were little books of humor then, but there was never anything like this. So there was no precedent, nothing you could talk about. So I started to do it myself. And around the corner from where I lived was a blueprint shop in the days when they still used blueprints and photostats. And I knew the guy who ran the photostat machine. And I would do these little squiggle and I’d take them in and I’d say, “okay, enlarge, do a series of little enlargements.” And when it got to the point where the squiggle, when you enlarge a line enough, it starts to get coarse and hairy. And I said, when it reached that point, I knew we had the squiggle, right? The dot was no problem. Of course, then the line, but then all those other geometric figures. And I discovered a place, Yeshiva University in New York had a magazine called “Scripta Mathematica,” and it was a very erudite magazine, none of which I could understand. But they had this library and it was a big central room with an enormous table. And the first time I walked in, I had to sign a lot of things. They were very careful about who they let in. There were about three or four people sitting around, none of whom looked to be under 90 and bookshelves all around all four walls.
And I would take things out and find all of these diagrams — illustrated, various kinds of mathematical equations, and I would pick out the ones I wanted. And they were wonderful. They were so beautiful. So a lot of those ended up in there. Then I went to some of the daily news newspaper file to get some of the photographs that are in there. The hardest thing for me was to find a portrait of Euclid to put in the book. But it took me months to get all these things together. And again, when it was all done, I just had this terrible feeling, who’s going to think this funny? Nobody’s going to think, I think it’s funny, but that’s me. Nobody else is going to, and that one’s been around now for 46, 47 years. So.
