Looking for a book

[tamarinne]

Cross-posted to bookfind

I'm looking for a book for which I have the following description:

A "choose your own adventure" type children's storybook which would have been written and published sometime between 1900-1930.  It was hardback, set and very likely produced in England and was about a girl and a boy searching the local countryside for buried treasure, with "go to page such and such" story options at the end of each page.

If anyone even has a suggestion for places where I could try to track this down, it would be much appreciated!   (For that matter, if anyone knows of any "choose your own adventure" type books or plays that date back more than fifty years heck, earlier than the late 70's/early 80's, those would be helpful too.)

Comments

[herooftheage.livejournal.com]

I didn't find what you asked for, but here's at least an interesting literary version: http://www.gamebooks.org/show_series.php?id=1045. One of the claims I read is that Robert Frost backed a lot of these sorts of books, but I couldn't find any proof of it.

[tamarinne.livejournal.com]

Ooo, great link!

Yeah, the origin of the Robert Frost thing (I believe) is a humorous article about the purported "origins" of this type of story. The author claimed that Robert Frost loved these books as exemplified by his poem "two roads diverged in a yellow wood" etc. It's a very silly article, but sadly other people (including our own marketing director, sigh) seem to have a hard time understanding that not everything you read on the internet should be taken as verbatim truth.

[herooftheage.livejournal.com]

Ooo, great link!

Thanks. IMNSHO, any day spent reading Borges is a day well spent.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

No pointers, I'm afraid. But if you *do* find something, please post about it! As far as I know, the form only dates to the 1970s, and if it existed earlier, I'd be fascinated to hear about it.

[tamarinne.livejournal.com]

The earliest confirmed example I have thus far is a story by Raymond Queneau, called "A Story as You Like It", published in 1967. Queneau was a experimental author who spent some time hanging out with the French surrealists. A translated version the story is here: http://www.thing.de/projekte/7:9%23/queneau_1.html and a cool graph of the structure of the story is here: http://www.e-critures.org/_PER/conte0.html

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the pointer!

[door-oakheart.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately I don't have any suggestions for you but I wanted to comment on the cool new icon! Cool!

[tamarinne.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I'm tremendously pleased with the picture - favorite hair acting shot ever! :)

[door-oakheart.livejournal.com]

Jealous!

[gyzki.livejournal.com]

"choose your own adventure" type books or plays

Plays? I can imagine an improv troupe pausing at crucial junctures to poll the audience which way the story should go, but I have trouble imagining a scripted play that worked anything like this. For your main question, sorry, I can't think of any examples earlier than the 70s, which would make the book genre almost simultaneous with Adventure and its ilk.

And speaking of choose-your-own-adventure books, you know the story that Steve Jackson wrote one of these, becoming the first author to publish anonymously under his own name?

[tamarinne.livejournal.com]

Well, there are a few modern examples of plays with variable endings where the audience chooses. Shear Madness, for example, or the Dickens murder mystery where he never finished the story... I can't think of the name off the top of my head. The Mystery of Edwin Drood? Something like that.

But the reason I'm doing this research is because my theater company is doing a 'choose your own adventure' type play. It may be an utter disaster, it may be hilarious, it may be both... it's hard to say at this juncture.

And I hadn't heard that story about Steve Jackson, that's great!