The Devil's China?

I have several early printed copies of The Devil's Staircase floating around my house, and I recently came across an early version which had the original chapter arrangement. Jack Shalom, who had the unenviable task of proofreading to my debut book, upon reading the first draft sent to him, suggested switching the chapters around to make it a more enjoyable book. I forget Jack's exact words, but basically he was saying to leave the dry schputzpakah until the end or you'll lose half (or more) of your readership. He was right and I switched the chapters around so the fun impromptu material came first. It was a great suggestion. It helped that I was reading another book sent to me at the time, and I realised that I'd begun to skim read pretty early on because there was a fair amount of dry material to get through before the interesting stuff. Not especially interesting, but tonight I was reminded of a gift I received which had a very novel link to the book.

Here is a photo of the contents page from the early draft of the inside cover of The Devil's Staircase.

Last year we hosted a guest from China who very generously gave us a China dinner set as a gift, which they had had made with the motif from my first book. The motif I adopted was a part of the back design artwork for the card illustrations. Each piece of the stunning 30 piece China dinner set was stamped with the motif right down to the soup spoons!

You're right, it's still not that interesting! But I get an extra kick every time we eat Chinese food.