Media pioneer Nanni Balestrini experimented early on with computers in literary production. His combinatorial novel Tristano from 1966 represents the idea of a love story, of which there are infinitely many variants. For this reason, Balestrini planned an edition in which every copy of the novel was supposed to feature a different computer generated text, that is, one of the 109,027,350,432,000 possible permutations of all the novel’s passages. Accordingly, he describes Tristano as “only the first experiment that exploits in a limited way the great potential offered by technological innovation,” and “offering original possibilities for freedom of creation and communication with the audience.”

In this way, Balestrini’s novel, in a series of one-offs, is an attack on the assumption of stable textuality as the basis of literary works: Just as “a spoken story changes more or less when told to different listen- ers, or at a different time,” it is now also possible for “a literary work, a novel, [to] be created, thanks to new technologies, no longer as an immutable unicum, but in a series of equivalent variants, each materialized in a book, the copy and personal story of each reader” (Nanni Balestrini, “Note on the Text,” xii).

But this idea of variance could not be realized until 2007, forty years after Tristano’s first edition, where the entire print run contains the same variant of the text: “The novel, constructed in the spirit of computer-assisted combinatorics, is so digital that its existence on paper requires digital printing technology” (Hannes Bajohr, “Print on Demand as Strategy and Genre,” 630). Little is known about the exact production process, but it does not appear to have been automated. Correspondence from the German translator Peter O. Chotjewitz (preserved in the German Literature Archive Marbach) indicates that probably 2,000 individual PDFs were produced by hand for the German edition and passed on to the printer.

The fact that every copy of the edition is unique is indicated in the paratext: the copies of the Italian edition from 2007 and the English and German translations are numbered on the cover, and thus clearly individuated. In addition, the blurb on the back cover of the Italian and German edition advertises the “anomaly” of this book as a sensation: “This copy is not the same as all the others / But your own personal, unrepeatable book / That has chosen you from an infinity of possible versions / Because the story of Tristan is many stories / And every reader has the right to his own story.”