Composition No. 1 – A Review
August 25, 2011
I first heard about Composition No. 1 through another book, Twisty Little Passages, which examines the history and impact of Interactive Fiction (Including the humble text adventure).
Owing to it’s rarity I never expected to actually own a copy, but here it is – beautifully re-imagined, for a new audience, by Visual Editions.
The first thing that hits you upon opening the box, containing the 150 pages that comprise this piece of work, is bemusement. Composition No. 1 flies in the face of our conventional understanding of how to consume a piece of literature. The most obvious way that this manifests itself is through its unbound pages.
The idea is that you shuffle the pages to create your own story – a quick factorial calculation (150!) reveals 3.8089226376305687e+260 unique combinations (that’s a lot) or, as its more elegantly framed in the introduction, 150 different beginnings with 149 possible endings. keep reading…
