Eco, Umberto, "How and Why I Write," in Umberto Eco's Alternative: The Politics of Culture and the Ambiguities of Interpretation, edited by Norma Bouchard and Veronica Pravadelli, Peter Lang Publishers, 1998, pp. 282—302.

Eco offers an excellent first person account of his writing process, describing how he first builds a world for his novels.

Eco, Umberto, and Thomas A. Sebeok, The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, Indiana University Press, 1983.

Eco and Sebeok have assembled a collection of ten essays examining the method of abduction in the works of Poe's detective Auguste Dupin, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's detective Sherlock Holmes, and American semiotician Charles S. Peirce.

Inge, M. Thomas, ed., Naming the Rose: Essays on Eco's "The Name of the Rose," University Press of Mississippi, 1988.

Inge has collected ten essays by noted scholars as well as a preliminary checklist of Eco criticism in English, current to...