A Big Ball of String is a 1958 children's picture book by Marion Holland. It is told in simple rhymes, and features simple, realistic pictures. It is about a boy that decides to put together a big ball of string. After unsuccessfully trying to gather string from his mother's sewing kit and his father's fishing gear, he finds string at the town dump and makes a gigantic ball of string. He is disappointed when he becomes ill, forestalling his plans for string use, but he quickly finds that, with the help of his big ball of string, he can operate his model railroad and other toys from bed, and also use his big ball of string as a type of early remote control set-up to fetch clothing from his closet, etc.
I remember being very impressed by this book as a child, both because the idea of scrounging and finding things appealed to me, and making mechanisms to control things appealed to me. In the 1980s, we had much less automation in the household and the idea of controlling things remotely, and making devices to do so, was intriguing. Later on, as information technology, such as the internet, came to the fore, the idea of having a "big ball of string" to pull and tug on, connected to everything, took on a new light for me.