A working writer's ledger: twenty-two years of dime novels and pulps, with the plots, the rates per word, the rejections, the editors, and exactly how much money each story made. Cook wrote at a pace few pulp writers ever matched, and he later published his system of plotting as Plotto. There is no other book like it - the machinery of popular fiction, itemised by the man feeding it. Fifty-six plates of painters such as Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins, spanning 1830 to 1925, picture the quiet interiors and working scenes that set off a lifetime of story-mill labor.