Begin with the object, because the object is the argument. B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, first published in 1969, arrives not as a codex but as a laminated box containing twenty-seven unbound sections. The first and last are fixed. The twenty-five sections between them—ranging, according to the standard account, from a single paragraph to twelve pages—are designed to be read in any order the reader chooses. The novel is, in the most literal sense, shipped unordered.
That description is now familiar enough to function as a set piece in histories of experimental fiction. What tends to get lost in the retelling is the degree to which the box was a production problem before it was a literary gesture. The formal radicalism of The Unfortunates is inseparable from paper stock, binding costs, box assembly, warehousing, and the willingness of a publisher to absorb the expense of manufacturing a book that cannot be bound. To read the novel as a material and institutional artifact is not to diminish its formal ambition. It is to see where that ambition was constrained, and by what.
What the box actually contains
The bibliographic facts are straightforward and worth stating plainly. The Unfortunates was published in 1969 by Panther Books in the UK, with a US edition from Secker & Warburg. It was reissued by Picador in 1999 with an introduction by Jonathan Coe, and by New Directions in 2008, with a paperback edition following in 2009. The New Directions catalogue describes it as a “book in a box” in which “the chapters are presented unbound, to be read in any order the reader chooses,” and lists the 2009 paperback at $24.95 with a page count of 176. The 1969 UK edition is described as twenty-seven unbound sections in a laminated box, 244 pages.
The discrepancy in page counts between editions is itself a small lesson in how format shapes the record. A boxed set of loose sections does not paginate the way a bound book does; the page count attributed to an edition depends on what the cataloguer counts and how. This is not a trivial bibliographic curiosity. It is the first sign that the book’s material form resists the standard descriptive apparatus of the trade.
The publisher’s objection was economic before it was aesthetic
The most revealing fact in the publication history is that Secker & Warburg initially reacted negatively to the idea of an unbound book, partly because of the expense. Johnson also made demands for a particular kind of paper for the chapters. These two details belong together. The box was not a neutral container for a radical text; it was the text’s condition of possibility and its limit. A novel that must be manufactured as twenty-seven separate pieces, boxed, priced, shipped, and catalogued is a commodity whose form is entangled with industrial decisions—paper stock, printing runs, assembly labour, and the cost of a box that does not behave like a spine.
It is worth steelmanning the publisher’s position rather than treating it as philistine resistance. A publisher asked to produce an unbound book faces real problems: how to price it against comparable novels, how to ship it without damage, how to display it in a bookshop, how to persuade a circulating library or a wholesaler to stock an object that does not shelve. These are not trivial concerns, and they are the concerns that determine whether a formal experiment reaches readers at all. Johnson’s demand for a particular paper adds a further constraint: the sections had to feel right in the hand, which means the production budget had to accommodate a specification that a standard novel would never require.
The box, in other words, was expensive and contested before it was celebrated. That order of events matters. The formal gesture did not float free of the market; it was negotiated through it.
The translation test: where the box could and could not travel
The clearest evidence that the randomness of The Unfortunates is partly an artifact of packaging comes from its translations. When the book was first published in Hungary, it appeared as a normal paperback. To preserve the possibility of random order, symbols were printed above each of the twenty-five random sections, with the same symbols reprinted on the back page. The reader was instructed to cut out or trace the symbols, put them into a receptacle, and draw them out to create a random order.
This is a remarkable solution, and it tells us something the English-language reception tends to obscure. The randomness was not intrinsic to the text in a way that survived translation automatically. It had to be reconstructed by the publisher, and the reconstruction depended on what the local market could bear. A Hungarian paperback with a cut-out lottery is not the same object as a laminated box of loose sections, but it preserves the reader’s encounter with disorder. The form migrated; the packaging did not.
The Dutch edition, by contrast, is listed as a “book-in-a-box” published in 2008 by Querido in Amsterdam. The Italian edition, published by Rizzoli in 2011, is listed in a “Box set, Paperback” format. Where the box could travel, it travelled; where it could not, the publisher simulated the disorder by other means. This is the strongest available evidence for the argument that the book’s randomness was always partly a matter of packaging rather than a property that inhered in the words alone.
None of this diminishes Johnson’s achievement. It clarifies it. The novel’s form is a designed experience, and design is always local, budgeted, and negotiated.
The adaptation problem: randomness on the radio
The format’s portability is tested again, and more severely, by the 2010 BBC Radio 3 adaptation. The production was recorded in seventeen parts, randomised in a draw that took place on The Verb, and then posted on the BBC website, where listeners could make their own random order to listen to. The novel’s disorder migrated from a box of paper to a broadcast and then to a web interface.
This is worth pausing over because it shows what the box was actually doing. The box was a technology for producing a particular kind of reading experience—one in which the reader confronts the text’s sequence as a decision rather than a given. When the technology changed, the experience had to be rebuilt. The radio adaptation did not reproduce the box; it reproduced the effect of the box by other means. That is what a formal device is: not a fixed object but a set of instructions for producing an experience, instructions that can be reimplemented when the original materials are unavailable.
Reception then and now: the same object, a different frame
When The Unfortunates was first published, reviews were largely negative. One critic described the boxed work as a “Kleenex novel.” Another review, in the Ottawa Citizen, observed that the wrapper holding the loose chapters “is ALL that holds this novel together.” These are not stupid objections. They identify a real risk: that the formal device might substitute for the novel’s substance rather than serve it.
By the time of the 1999 Picador reissue and the 2008 New Directions edition, the critical frame had changed. Reviews of the Picador edition praised Johnson’s writing and argued that the emotion he wrote with made the random nature of the story work. A Daily Telegraph review suggested that when Johnson wrote about misery, Philip Larkin and Samuel Beckett “seem wry and quipping.” The New York Times review of the New Directions edition suggested it is hard to imagine a novel that is less solipsistic.
What changed between 1969 and 1999? Not the book. The object was materially the same—twenty-seven sections, a fixed first and last, twenty-five shuffled between them. What changed was the frame around it: Johnson’s posthumous reputation, the consolidation of experimental fiction into teachable canons, and a reading culture more accustomed to non-linear form. The reception shift is evidence about institutions of reading, not about the text’s intrinsic quality. That is not a cynical conclusion. It is the ordinary way literary reputations are made: through reissues, introductions, and the slow work of critics who return to a book with better questions.
What Johnson said he was doing
Johnson’s own account of the book is worth quoting because it sets the terms of the argument. He wrote that he did not think the solution was complete: “I did not think then, and do not think now, that this solved the problem completely… But I continue to believe that my solution was nearer; and even if it was only marginally nearer, then it was still a better solution to the problem of conveying the mind’s randomness than the imposed order of a bound book.”
This is a modest claim, and it is more defensible than the rhetoric that has grown around the book. Johnson is not saying that the box solves the problem of representing memory. He is saying that it is nearer than a bound book, and that even a marginal improvement is worth the cost. The hedge is the argument. A critic who treats The Unfortunates as a triumphant solution to the problem of randomness is overreading Johnson’s own stated position.
The box, on this reading, is a manufactured approximation of mental disorder—an industrial product designed to simulate the absence of imposed order. That is a strange and interesting thing for a novel to be. It is also a thing that cannot be separated from the fact that it was manufactured, priced, and sold.
Why the material history matters for criticism
The temptation, when writing about a book like this, is to treat the box as a metaphor and move on to the text. The material history resists that temptation. The publisher’s cost objection, Johnson’s paper specification, the Hungarian cut-out lottery, the Dutch box, the Italian box set, the radio adaptation’s seventeen parts—these are not anecdotes surrounding the novel. They are the record of how the novel’s form was produced and reproduced under different constraints.
That record supports a specific critical claim: the formal radicalism of The Unfortunates is real, but it is bounded by the economics of production. The box was expensive, contested, and difficult to ship. It survived reissue because publishers were willing to absorb the cost of reproducing it, and it survived translation in simulated forms where the box could not travel. A criticism that ignores these facts is not more rigorous; it is less. It mistakes the book’s idea for the book’s existence.
This is the case for slow reading against market-driven simplification. A novel that ships unordered asks the reader to do work that a standard novel does not: to decide, to shuffle, to tolerate a sequence that was not chosen by an editor. That work is the point. To reduce the book to its concept—”the novel you read in any order”—is to lose the thing itself, which is a box of paper that had to be manufactured, priced, and carried home.
Questions readers ask
Do I have to read the sections in a random order?
The design specifies a fixed first and last section, with the twenty-five sections between them open to any order. Reading them in the order they happen to fall out of the box is consistent with the design. So is choosing an order deliberately. The book does not prescribe a method beyond the fixed endpoints.
Is the boxed edition still available?
The New Directions catalogue page for the book describes a 2009 paperback edition and notes that it is “back in print in a limited quantity.” Availability of the boxed format varies by edition and by market, and the catalogue data for different editions lists different formats—paperback, hardcover, and box set. A reader looking for a specific format should check the publisher’s current listing rather than rely on secondary descriptions.
Why do different editions list different page counts?
Because a box of unbound sections does not paginate like a bound book. The 1969 UK edition is described as 244 pages; the New Directions paperback is listed at 176 pages. Page counts for this book depend on what is counted and how the edition is assembled, which is one reason the bibliographic record is less stable than for a conventional novel.
Did the translations keep the box?
Some did and some did not. The Dutch edition is listed as a book-in-a-box; the Italian edition is listed as a box set in paperback. The Hungarian edition appeared as a normal paperback with symbols that readers cut out or traced and drew from a receptacle to generate a random order. The format travelled where local publishing conditions allowed it and was simulated where they did not.
Was the book a success when it was first published?
The retrieved sources do not include sales figures, so no claim about commercial success or failure can be made here. What the record does show is that initial reviews were largely negative and that the book was reissued in 1999 and 2008, which indicates sustained institutional interest rather than immediate commercial triumph.
Sources
Publication facts, the publisher’s cost objection, Johnson’s paper specification, the Hungarian edition’s cut-out symbols, the 2010 radio adaptation, the 1999 and 2008 reissues, the “Kleenex novel” description, and Johnson’s quoted statement are drawn from the Wikipedia article “The Unfortunates,” which cites Jonathan Coe’s biography Like a Fiery Elephant (2005), Coe’s 1999 introduction to the Picador edition, and Johnson’s Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? (1973). The New Directions catalogue page supplies the publisher’s description of the book, the 2009 paperback edition data, and the quoted reviews by Anthony Burgess, Samuel Beckett, and Charles Taylor. Edition-format data for the Dutch, Italian, and other translations are drawn from the Goodreads editions listing for the work. Claims about the reception shift and the relationship between format and production economics are interpretation, not sourced fact.
