Tarmac Group of the 1980s, British housebuilding was accounting for half of group profits but it was not the only activity to have been expanded. An alternative profits centre had been built up in the United States, starting in 1984, with the staged acquisition of Lone Star Industries; by the end of the decade Tarmac was operating across seven states in the United States. Construction in the United Kingdom had also grown and Tarmac was involved in such prestige projects as the Thames Barrier and the Channel Tunnel. However, the expansionary nature of the group did not leave it well placed to
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