Michael Sims, author of The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime, our guest blogger for the week of 4/13

I appreciate the question but I'm not sure how to answer it -- even though it has come up a lot lately. But I'll try. I've always felt that some of life's greatest adventures, such as lust and curiosity, get such bad press. (Hmm, perhaps there's a book in that. . . .) To me, curiosity is a gorgeous sensual pleasure. Nothing gives me more innocent fun than heading off in some new direction to explore an interest.

The books emerge out of these explorations. I don't want the process to sound exotic; it's very mundane. I always think of my nature and science books as just one more chapter in an ongoing natural history of everyday life. Recently someone actually asked me how I'd describe my ideal woman, and I thought about it and realized I had never given a moment's thought to the notion of an ideal woman because I like real women just fine, especially my own wife. And that made me realize that I feel the same way about the world around me. I don't like the mess we've made of it, certainly. But I like this planet. My first response to it is a kind of naive affection. I like squirrels and starlings and rain just fine; I'm not really going around looking for hippos and secretary birds and monsoons. To impress you with my erudition, I'll cite Calvin and Hobbes. In one strip Calvin is worrying about life, about the possibility of an afterlife, and if we have nothing but this one world right here. And Hobbes says, "Oh, what the heck. I'll take it anyway."

I feel the same way. So I want to learn as much as possible about it while I'm here. Hence my book about the visible human body, head to toe (Adam's Navel), because I had had neck surgery and was lying down flat for weeks thinking too much about what I couldn't do. And then, while on my honeymoon in Dubrovnik, standing out on the balcony at night, I stared up at the moon and suddenly realized how I would write my book about the day, the progress from dawn to night (Apollo's Fire). I would simply slow down the journey we all take. I would live in the moment all day and think about it and appreciate it.

And then of course curiosity gets out of hand. And you have bills to pay. And after a while a publisher calls up, as National Geographic Books did last year, and says, "Hey, want to write a book about how animals develop in the womb?" Or a magazine says, "Tell us about oysters" or "Want to explore the Natchez Trace?" And what could be more fun than that?

As for the three collections I've edited for Penguin -- and there's a fourth in the works -- they simply emerge from my growing interest in some corner of literature and my gradual realization that I wasn't going to find out there quite what I was looking for. So each time I think, Well, what is it you're looking for? And I figure that out and then I try to create it. That's how The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel came about and especially the new one, The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime.

Where did the interests originally come from? I don't know. I try to trust my own compass. If I feel it twitching in a new direction, I try to wander over there and see if the signal gets any stronger. Sometimes it doesn't. Often it does. Of course, this ridiculous, crazy, irresponsible, gorgeous planet has too many entertainments for me to run out of them. Publishers and readers will tire of me long before I tire of exploring new corners. Then I'll go back to looking things up just for myself, which is precisely what I did as a kid.