In 2014 Windy City Publishers released Tom’s most recent book, Never Enough: The Creative Life of Alex Jordan, the biography of an extraordinary architect/sculptor who created The House on the Rock in southwestern Wisconsin. During the last fifty years, millions of people from all over the world have visited the House and marveled at its unique architecture, as well as its vast myriad collections.
This biography traces the outlines of Alex Jordan's private life and examines his creative process in detail through the exploration of his most important works. In addition, Never Enough plumbs Alex Jordan's deeper motivations for collecting on such a massive scale and examines the place of his work in American culture, and the world at large.
The author worked with Jordan as a sculptor in the 1970s–80s during Alex's most creative period. Tom became Creative Director of The House on the Rock following the death of Mr. Jordan in 1989.
A Mythic Obsession: The World of Dr. Evermor, published by Chicago Review Press in 2008, is Tom’s first book. It is the biography of the highly eccentric Tom Every, a world renowned visionary sculptor who works under the name of Dr. Evermor.
Anyone who has visited the extraordinary visionary environments created by Tom Every can't help but come away with puzzling questions about the meaning of the work. From an early age Tom Every collected scrap metal, but unlike other dealers, he felt that many of industrial objects he found contained something of the spirit of those made or used them. He began to assemble the scrap into whimsical and mysterious sculptures using his magical aesthetic to preserve the spirits he sensed within the artifacts. In the 1970s Tom's creative spirit drew him to Alex Jordan and his House on the Rock where the author also was working as Jordan's sculptor. Every made great contributions to the famous attraction before he set off on his own to find his true voice. In addition to the hundreds of welded sculptures he created, he poured great effort in the Forevertron, a massive mythical fantasy environment where he found his alter ego: Dr. Evermor.