To make it more Borgesian for you, I have been baffled by the fact that the author of Automata Theory, Matthew Simon, has left almost no traces on Google besides this book and one other book called Emergent Computation, which is similarly eccentric. (Browsing it now, I came across a weird quote about Pope Clement and self-flagellation, then it's right back to automata theory again).

Could it be that he wrote under a pen name?