Invention: In Quest of the Bright Idea

Sandy Campbell is a reference librarian in the Science and Technology Library at the University of Alberta.

This book should be titled “The Color Z Bait Story,” because the
memoir is about Roy Mayer’s development of that product. Every
“backyard” inventor should read it just to learn about the
difficulties and cost of trying to get an invention to market (a large
portion of the book describes what has to happen after a patent is
granted).

However, aside from its usefulness as a warning of the difficulties and
dangers awaiting the would-be inventor, it is not a particularly good
read. The author’s self-focus eventually becomes tiresome, and though
others are mentioned in relation to the project, their actions are
judged according to whether or not they were supportive. There are also
lots of generalizations (always dangerous), and the book is filled with
often-irrelevant detail (who cares who hung the curtains in the garage
when it was converted to a lab or that one of Maye’'s agents “lived
with his pretty girlfriend in a well-kept rental townhouse out in the
suburbs and weighed in at about 175 lbs”?). A thorough editing might
have made the book more readable.