“I would have liked very much to explore certain of these parallel fictional universes, and I had proposed to my Publisher, in spite of the enormous amount of additional work it would have imposed upon me, to furnish him with an absolute forest of multiple diverging and reconverging tales, with approved spatio-temporal travel maps, and a guide provided for the tourists of the fiction. The same unchangeable book would not have been stupidly printed for everyone but, rediscovering good old thirteenth-century customs (it was only yesterday), during the age of manuscripts, each reader would have his own personalized book. The book would not be available in stores. Or rather, in good bookstores, you would have had the chance to choose: either the standard edition, everybody’s book . . . or else you would have placed an order for your edition, chosen according to a “menu” of possible forkings in the course of the tale. This copy would not yet have been printed. By pressing here and there on a keyboard, the bookstore clerk would have transmitted to the computer-printer the specifications of the novel and at once, thanks to modern typesetting/composition processes, vroom, vroom, the book would be on its way; and it would arrive in no time.”

(Jacques Roubaud, Hortense is Abducted (1989), quoted in Dominic Di Bernardi’s afterword to The Great Fire of London, pp. 321–2.)