Not the content, but the book itself. No audio books or e-books please, and it must have been released to the general public for purchase.
First example: The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson (1969) from Panther Books. The Unfortunates - Wikipedia As they put it, “It features 27 unbound sections, with a first and last chapter specified, but the 25 sections between them, ranging from a single paragraph to 12 pages in length, being designed to be read in any order, giving a total of 15.5 septillion possible combinations that the story can be read in.”
You know what they say-If you have to have one book on a deserted island, have one that can be read 15.5 septillion different times without reading it the same way twice.
Just post about one book, no lists. Share the…joy?
First thing that comes to my mind is I, Libertine by Frederick R. Ewing. It was a joke that was started by Jean Shepherd (radio host of Christmas Story fame). He had his listeners ask for it in bookstores and libraries, even though it never existed. After a while, it ended up on best seller lists, even though it didn’t exist. It eventually got written and published, (and by most accounts, it sucks).
I know it’s not exactly what you’re looking for, but it IS a book of an unusual nature. In 1953 Ballantine published an edition (limited to 200 copies) of Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 (which was about book burning) in an asbestos binding. It would’ve been better to publish the whole book printed on asbestos, but they made their point.
But I am not looking for “exactly” anything. The book I pointed out was only a general example, not a guideline. I am looking for books of an unusual nature, not the stories themselves.
In the 1920s and ‘30s the publishing house behind Harper’s Magazine published a series of hardcover mysteries with the pages containing the solution sealed in tissue paper. The front cover boldly stated that a book with the tissue intact could be returned for a full refund. Harper claimed that out of the 60,000 copies sold in the first batch, only three were returned.
Well, there is Finnegan’s Wake, of course, which invented a new language, and had no plot to speak of. According to AI: “James Joyce intentionally invented a new language, rejected normal plots, and mixed ideas from dozens of countries. It uses multilingual portmanteaus, nonlinear dream logic, and dense allusions.”
I highly recommend The Madman’s Library by Edward Brooke-Hitching, not as an example of “book of an unusual nature”, but as a listing of and guide to Books of an Unusual Nature. I’ve derived much satisfaction from reading it.
Books written in blood and books that kill, books of the insane and books that hoaxed the globe, books invisible to the naked eye and books so long they could destroy the Universe, books worn into battle and books of code and cypher whose secrets remain undiscovered. Spell books, alchemist scrolls, wearable books, edible books, books to summon demons, books written by ghosts, and more all come together in the most curiously strange library imaginable. From the Qur’an written in the blood of Saddam Hussein, to the gorgeously decorated fifteenth-century lawsuit filed by the Devil against Jesus, to the most enormous book ever created, The Madman’s Library features many long-forgotten, eccentric, and extraordinary volumes gathered from around the world and features hundreds of remarkable images and entertaining facts and stories to discover.
Brooke-Hutching’s other books are worth reading, too, especially (in this vein) The Madman’s Gallery and The Madman’s Orchestra
Cain’s Jawbone. It’s a 100 page murder mystery puzzle, but the pages are out of order. There’s one correct order, but you still have to figure out which of the characters are the victims, and which are the killers.
This is an interactive history book where you take control of key decisions during the Second World War, stepping into the shoes of real commanders and leaders — including Winston Churchill and President Eisenhower — and making the strategic and tactical decisions they faced.
A book I read last year, These Memories do not Belong to Us, by Yiming Ma, was a series of vignettes, with a foreword encouraging the reader to read them in any order (though with a suggestion to at least save the last of them until the end). The last vignette asks the reader whether they read them all straight through or not, with a suggestion that not doing so might be considered a small act of resistance against authoritarianism.
Though it was still bound and published in the conventional way.
Georges Perec, “La Disparition”, or in translation “A Void.” Written without the letter “E”, by far the most common letter in both French and English. Other translations have made similar language-specific constraints.
Mark Z. Danielewski - House of Leaves, a book I’ve owned for 20 years but haven’t got around to reading yet. Unconventional format, influential on the limnal spaces/Backrooms meme and movie as of late.
William Gibson’s Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) was a combined long poem and art book which self-destructed as it was read.
Its principal notoriety arose from the fact that the poem, stored on a 3.5" floppy disk, was programmed to encrypt itself after a single use; similarly, the pages of the artist’s book were treated with photosensitive chemicals, effecting the gradual fading of the words and images from the book’s first exposure to light.
Tête-bêche books. These are bound head-to-tail so that whatever side you pick up is a different title. They go back forever, but the most famous examples today are the Ace Doubles series of science fiction. They did them for westerns and mysteries as well.
My favorites are books that had two opposing viewpoints counterbalanced. [b/w = backed with]
Spousery: His Edition by Emily Hahn b/w Spousery: Her Edition by Eric Hatch
Oh! Well! You Know How Women Are! by Irwin S. Cobb b/w Isn’t That Just Like a Man! by Mary Robert Rinehart
Stan & Jan Berenstain’s Flipsville: The Adult’s Guide to Teen-Age Behavior b/w Squaresville: The Teen’s Guide to Adult Behavior
There is a book titled Gadsby, by Ernest Vincent Wright. The letter e, the most common letter in the English language, does not appear in a single word.
Alasdair Gray’s 1982 Janine is typographically odd. I have seen some descriptions of the “metafictionality” of Violet Allen’s recent Plastic, Prism, Void but haven’t read it.
