A word-of-mouth book

I bought an e-book of Pillars of the Earth, because my paperback copy is old & battered. I'm pretty sure I didn't pay for it in the first place -- as I recall, my cousin's ex-wife gave it to me, years ago when they were still married. The new copy was 99 cents or maybe $1.99, I'm not sure, but I was thinking, well, I haven't re-read that in a while, and I'd rather read an e-book than the paperback. (And it's one less book on the bookshelves, which is an ongoing project of mine.) I think I had this vague sense at the time - before I actually read the book, I mean - that Pillars of the Earth was a religious book of some sort, and I wondered if that wasn't why my cousin's wife gave it to me, because this branch of the extended family knows perfectly well that I, well, don't go to church. (That's the polite Texas way of putting it.)
 
I know there's three or four of these books, right? (or maybe more) but I've only read the first one. If I re-read it and I enjoy it, I'll see about reading more of them. - But that's not really what I wanted to write about. What interested me was that when I opened the e-book, there was a preface. It's not new, it was written in 1999 - but clearly it was written some time after the book was published. (The book was published in '89, so maybe it was a 10th-anniversary thing?).

Anyway, I did eventually read this book, as I imagine you've guessed by now, and I think maybe I even read it twice, but I may not have read it since. I thought about discarding it a couple of times, and I thought, no, I want to read that again at some point. (Thus the e-book.) But obviously I did like it. It was mostly about very religious characters, because, well, it's about the building of a cathedral. But I'm interested in architecture - and this is why I was interested in the preface, because it says that Mr Follett is not religious either but he is interested in cathedral architecture (well, obviously, since he wrote multiple books about it), and furthermore he was brought up very religious, in some group that sounds vaguely Quaker-ish and didn't believe in decoration, which does sort of explain why cathedral architecture interested him so much, later on - cathedrals in general having a sort of more-is-better approach to decoration, I mean. And the preface goes on and explains how he went on to write the book, and that its popularity sort of grew by word of mouth even though it wasn't a best-seller in most places - and hey, word-of-mouth did get me to read it, even if I didn't pay for a copy until lately.

Mostly I was amused at how that story fit in with my own. Baptist is not exactly non-mainstream, not around here, anyway, but I grew up in a church with a very plain-vanilla building and I remember being stunned by just the Episcopalian cathedral in Houston. (I was in choir and we went to sing at the church service there.) And I've always been drawn to really elaborate church architecture.