The Making of Americans .. Volume 4 of 4 Janet Malcolm put off reading The Making of Americans for a long time. “Every time I picked up the book, I put it down again. It was too heavy and thick, and the type was too small and dense. I finally solved the problem of its weight and bulk by taking a kitchen knife and cutting it into six sections. The book thus became more portable and (so to speak) readable.” This four volume edition saves you the trouble of carving up the book. The page, paragraph and line numbers in each volume match those of the Dalkey edition, which are used in most critical works about the novel – in particular, they are used in The Notebooks of Gertrude Stein for The Making of Americans , 1903-1912 , edited by Leon Katz.