On 20 February 1969, Panther Books (in association with Secker and Warburg) published B. S. Johnson's new novel, The Unfortunates. This "book in a box", as it would become known, featured twenty-seven individually bound and paginated chapters collected in a box, with only the first and last chapters identified as such; the intervening sections could thus be rearranged by the reader and read in any order they chose. Such formal experimentation was not unique—as several writers on Johnson, including Jonathan Coe, have acknowledged, the author was almost certainly aware of Marc Saporta's entirely loose-leaved novel, Composition No. 1 (translated from French into English in 1963)—nevertheless, the format of The Unfortunates has afforded it no little notoriety, acclaim and commentary over the years.