This is what the publishing world calls a “slice and dice” project. In this case Time Life Books decided to recast some of its most popular material in the form of easy-to-use, impossible-to-destroy laminated “maps“. We actually suggested this approach to Time Life a couple of years earlier when we proposed a series of small booklets called “The Bare Essentials”, each of which would deal with one very useful area of home repair. Jim’s argument at the time was that people these days are too busy to be seeking encyclopedic information about a subject like home repair, and what they really wanted was just the right information and nothing more. So “The Bare Essentials” would have included short booklets on how to install a dimmer switch, or how to rewire a lamp. This project never got the green light, but a couple of years later these “maps” came up, featuring the same general approach. The map format makes for a very compact and oddly-sequenced canvas. It was much harder than it looks to lay these pieces out effectively.