** please note cover wear ***

🔥THE CAVE OF TIME (CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE #1) By Edward Packard

The Cave of Time

a.k.a. Choose Your Own Adventure #1

by Edward Packard

First Published: July 1979

Platform: Paperback book

WARNING!!!!

Do not read this book straight through from beginning to end! These pages contain many different adventures you can go on in the Cave of Time. From time to time as you read along, you will be asked to make a choice. Your choice may lead to success or disaster!

The adventures you take are a result of your choice. You are responsible because you choose! After you make your choice, follow the instructions to see what happens to you next.

Remember—you cannot go back! Think carefully before you make a move! One mistake can be your last... or it may lead you to fame and fortune!

In the early hours of a morning in 1969, in the middle of a long commuter rail trip from Connecticut to Manhattan, a lawyer edging up on 40 is scribbling a complex diagram in a worn spiral notebook. The diagram looks “like a tree lying on its side with many branches and limbs.” He ignores the view out the window and his fellow passengers on the train, other men in business suits like him, on their way to work. He is busy. He’s designing a book you can play like a game.

A few nights earlier, Edward Packard had been spinning a bedtime story for his two daughters. With three hours of daily commuting, about the only chance he had to see the girls during the week was those bedtime stories, and rather than reading them out of a book, he liked to make up his own:

I had a character named Pete and I usually had him encountering all these different adventures on an isolated island. But that night I was running out of things for Pete to do, so I just asked [the girls] what they would do.

His daughters each gave a different answer, so Packard obligingly gave each of them their own ending. “What really struck me was the natural enthusiasm they had for the idea,” he later recalled. “And I thought: ‘Could I write this down?’”

Packard had always wanted to be a writer, and had tried his hand at a couple of children’s books he’d never managed to sell. Practicing law had seemed a steadier way to support a family. But now the idea of a book for kids that gave them multiple pathways through a story wouldn’t leave his head. He started sketching out flowcharts on the train to and from the office, working out from first principles the structural and organizational problems with branching narratives and limited page counts. Eventually he had an outline for a book he called The Adventures of You on Sugarcane Island. In the book, a rogue wave sweeps “you” off a ship, to wake up later on a deserted island:

...lying high on a huge sand dune. Behind you is a broad, sloping beach. You watch the foaming waves thrashing upon it. Ahead of you is a meadow of tall reeds bounded by high rocky hills. You are hungry and thirsty. You look out at the ocean and see nothing but endless blue water. Except for a few sea gulls hovering over the waves, you are all alone.

If you decide to walk along the beach, turn to page 5.

If you decide to climb the rocky hill, turn to page 6.

Packard hadn’t been the first to imagine such a book, or even to write one. Biblionauts of various eras had toyed with the notion of a book that contained its own strange rules for navigation. The 1930 novel Consider the Consequences! by Doris Webster and Mary Alden promised “a brand new idea in fiction—a story which ends in any one of a dozen or more different ways, depending entirely on the taste of the individual reader,” and included choice points like this one:

The reader who thinks she will be wise to avoid argument and trouble by eloping turns to paragraphs H-3. The one who thinks she would better decide to return home, determined to face the music and go through with her marriage in spite of opposition, turns to paragraphs H-4.

Other books, stage shows, or radio programs had tried one-off experiments with audience participation, letting the reader decide (or audience vote) on which direction the story should go. The 1935 play The Night of January 16th (by Ayn Rand, of all people) asked twelve random audience members to serve as jurors for a courtroom drama, and render a verdict before the final curtain: two different endings could unfold depending on their decision. In the 1950s and ’60s, experiments in “programmed learning” led to textbooks called Tutor Texts, with multiple-choice questions where each answer instructed the student to turn to a different page: incorrect responses would have detailed explanations to give students immediate feedback about where they’d gone wrong. But few of these efforts gained much traction, each created largely in ignorance of the others, and as experiments they were rarely repeated.

It seemed at first the same would prove true for Packard’s book. He didn’t know of any earlier attempts to create interactive novels, nor was he familiar with the still-nascent experiments with computer games happening at distant universities. But he thought his idea had potential. A friend in New York worked for the William Morris Agency, and helped Packard find a literary agent who dutifully shopped Sugarcane Island around to publishers. But there were no takers. After six months, the project was abandoned, the manuscript left to languish in a desk drawer. Packard kept practicing law, and might have done so until retirement except for a happenstantial fluke, years later.

In 1975 Packard was in Vermont and happened to be browsing through the spring issue of Vermont Life, one of those colorful grandparent magazines filled with recipes, photos of barn raisings, and feature stories on interesting fences. One article in that particular issue profiled a local company publishing children’s books and games, run by a couple named Connie and Ray Montgomery. With what the magazine assured the reader was typical Vermonter verve, the Montgomerys felt their books were doing something a little different: they were “specifically and exclusively for children”:

Most children’s books are significantly designed with the buyer in mind—the parent or grandparent... the distribution and displays are geared to the purchaser not the child. ...We want the child reader to get involved in what he is reading and experiencing. He should identify with the subject. ...He is learning to read, but in the process he is also learning about himself.

Something in the article sparked Packard’s imagination: maybe the photos of children clustered around one of the Montgomerys’ prototype books, which they’d take to local schools to try out on the kids rather than relying on adult opinions. Packard’s own children had appreciated the value of a story where you got to make decisions, when the New York publishing suits hadn’t given it a chance. Maybe Vermont Crossroads Press might be interested in his abandoned experiment.

Ray Montgomery had been involved with so-called “active learning” for years. After working as both a high school and college instructor, he’d developed roleplaying scenarios for Peace Corps volunteers, giving them practice negotiating tense scenarios they might encounter abroad. He had also helped run a summer school for remedial learners with a focus on “experiential learning”: “the most powerful way for kids, or for anyone, to learn something.” So he was primed to be receptive when Packard looked him up with a book that invited the reader to play along with the story. Before long they’d struck a deal for the Montgomerys’ company to publish Sugarcane. Released in 1976 as an oversized hardcover with a red and green dust jacket, it had a hopeful banner on the cover: “The Adventures of You Series.”

Montgomery knew he had something good on his hands even before the book’s release. “I Xeroxed 50 copies of Ed’s manuscript and took it to a reading teacher in Stowe. His kids—third grade through junior high—couldn’t get enough of it.” Everywhere he took the book the reaction was the same. But Vermont Crossroads was too small an operation to make much impact. Montgomery quickly wrote a second “Adventures of You” book, but it also languished in obscurity. Packard, growing frustrated, had started shopping the concept around to other publishers, and in 1977 struck a deal with Lippincott to release two new choice-based books, Deadwood City (1978) and The Third Planet From Altair (1979). Each used the phrase “Choose your own adventures” on the cover as part of its banner text, but not yet framed as the name of a series.

Montgomery was also looking for a bigger fish, and found one in Bantam Books. A young acquisitions editor there, Joëlle Delbourgo, immediately saw the idea’s potential: “My first reaction was that it was a brilliant concept and, to make an impact, you had to publish it as a series with a unifying cover concept.” When it came out that neither Lippincott nor Packard had registered a trademark on the “choose your own adventure” phrase, Bantam snatched it up, offering a regular writing contract to both Packard and Montgomery as a consolation prize. In July 1979 Packard’s The Cave of Time hit bookshops, branded on the cover as “Choose Your Own Adventure #1.” The dedication noted that “the concept, title, and editorial assistance” for the book had been provided by Packard’s daughter, Andrea.

In The Cave of Time, you’re visiting your uncle at Red Creek Ranch when you discover a curious cave entrance in a nearby canyon, uncovered by a rockslide. Stepping inside, you begin to feel unaccountably nervous. Hurrying back out reveals the world has changed, and you soon realize you’ve been transported to the midst of an Ice Age thousands of years earlier. You can choose to stay and explore this prehistoric world, or go back into the cave and try to find a way back to your own time. But each tunnel leads to a different place and epoch of history. Across the book’s branches you can find yourself in colonial America, medieval Europe, the time of the dinosaurs or an era beyond the death of the sun; you can witness such “best of” moments as Lincoln’s writing of the Gettysburg Address, the sinking of the Titanic, or the building of the Great Wall of China.

A recurring theme is the choice to stay and build a new life in a time and place that seems hospitable, or risk danger returning the cave to try to find a way home

fifteen minutes to complete: a chunk of time nicely aligned with the length of a bus ride or a recess. While later books would slow down the pace of choices to enable longer pathways with more plot and character development, and would merge branches more aggressively to increase the length of any given read-through, Cave of Time treats each choice as a true divergence, leading to forty different endings: eaten by the Loch Ness Monster, becoming a ship captain, or riding a mammoth off the edge of a cliff.

Thousands of years later when Dr. Carleton Frisbee, the famous paleontologist, finds your bones next to those of a wooly mammoth in the Red Creek excavation, he is amazed at how closely you resemble a twentieth-century human being.

*Ready to Ship!