Tarmac Group first listed on the Birmingham Stock Exchange in 1913 and then the London Stock Exchange in 1922. During the 1920s and ‘30s Tarmac had to cope with national strikes, recession and periods of intense competition. Nevertheless, the company gradually expanded its geographic coverage (particularly in the south east), increased its production of paving slabs and moved into road surfacing as well as supply. As with so many companies in the construction industry, the Second World War increased the demand for Tarmac’s services, notably for surfacing the large numbers of airfields being built or modernised. By the time of its half
The End of the Road of the Road" in 1958; it received only marginally more attention than "The Floating Opera". A revised edition in 1967 restored material cut from the first edition, and had a new introduction by Barth. Anchor Books collected these two novels in a single-volume edition in 1988; in his foreword to it Barth states he originally titled the book "What To Do Until the Doctor Comes", but Doubleday editor Edward Aswell persuaded him to change it, as he "feared the novel would be mistaken for a treatise on first aid". The story narrates the first-person confession Jacob Horner in the form