Today’s question at Booking Through Thursday:

There’s something wonderful about getting in on the ground floor of an author’s career–about being one of the first people to read and admire them, before they became famous best-sellers.
Which authors have you been lucky enough to discover at the very beginning of their careers?

Sarah Susanka, the architect who wrote The Not So Big House followed by many other books.

In the nineties, I had a hobby of dreaming about houses. That hobby was fed by shelter magazines that I would buy off the rack, often in places where we traveled because vacation was the perfect relaxed sort of time for dreaming. Our favorite place to travel at that time was the North Woods in Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, so my hobby was tilted a bit toward the regional magazines of the Great Lakes states. I gathered articles with descriptions and photos of houses I liked and eventually realized that I had several houses in my collection that were designed by Sarah Susanka, an architect in Minnesota. I started following her career more deliberately a year or two before she published The Not So Big House. I own all of her books, most in hardcover. Even though it now seems very unlikely that I will ever build a house from the ground up, and probably never do a major rehab, I still keep her books because I feel so connected to her work.

What author’s work did you know before they became famous? Check the comments of today’s Booking Through Thursday post for other people’s answers to that question.