For Henry Petroski, even an ordinary hotel room can hold technological wonders.

On tour promoting his new book, "Paperboy: Confessions of a Future Engineer" (Knopf), Mr. Petroski, a civil engineering professor at Duke University, has spent many recent nights in the company of complimentary chocolates on pillows. The experience, he says, has been the source of some recent intellectual turbulence. Consider, for example, "the way maids fix up towels and fold them.

"Every hotel staff has little idiosyncrasies, and some of them are quite clever," he explains in a phone interview from his hotel in New York, marveling that some towels come folded as intricately as table napkins at the Four Seasons.

Petroski doubts he could replicate such mechanical ingenuity – even though he understands intimately and intuitively the physics of suspension bridges.

Appreciation for life's details – as well as its more quotidian features like the paper clip and the box (all of which fold) – can sometimes border on obsession for this professor, who admits he's "always had a thing about things."

In "Paperboy," we meet a young Petroski who drooled over machinery, from bicycle accessories to his mother's meat grinder. Equally fascinating to him was the way bakers fold cake boxes without smearing the icing; the "mechanics of the nun's habit, how it pieced together and fastened to the various parts of her"; and the White Castle burgers whose "square shape meant there was no wasted space on the grill or on the matching square bun."

It's this piety around the common-but-nifty that drives "Paperboy," not to mention Petroski's earlier books such as "The Pencil," and "The Book on the Bookshelf."

"Paperboy" is by turns an insider's look at delivering papers and a tour of Long Island in the days of Elvis Presley, the Dodgers, and Civil Defense drills. Mostly, though, it's a memoir of a budding engineer for whom the news business was "a tour de force of technology."

Petroski joined the fraternity of paperboys for the now-defunct Long Island Press in 1954, the summer before he began eighth grade and the year his parents moved from Brooklyn to the Cambria Heights neighborhood of Queens.

Most papers did not yet arrive on stoops in customized plastic bags. Instead, Petroski had to learn to fold the newspaper, tucking it inside itself in such a way that it held together when tossed from a moving vehicle – in his case, a prized Schwinn bike.

This one feat – at first as elusive as a hat trick – preoccupied the 12-year-old. Then, an older boy's perfectly folded newspaper was a mechanical riddle for Petroski to solve.

Looking back in "Paperboy," however, he also sees its poetry: "It was a billet-doux wrapped in its own envelope, an aerogram from Shangri-La."

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