Catherine Housecroft: ‘Undergraduates do not want to buy big, heavy textbooks’

How did you get involved in writing textbooks?

I started working with a small publishing house before writing three Oxford chemistry primers on main group clusters, the heavier d-block metals and metal–metal bonded species. Pearson approached me to write a textbook on bioinorganic chemistry, but this was somewhat out of my field. I talked with my husband, Ed Constable, about the idea of writing a general chemistry textbook. That led to Chemistry, which is now in its fourth edition.