Saturday I happened on a wonderful find at a garage sale across the street. The guy was selling his collection of Choose Your Own Adventure® books. He didn’t have a huge collection, but he did have a bunch of the early ones, including this re-issue edition of the very first in the series, Edward Packard’s The Cave Of Time. Anyway, I bought all 15+ books for $5. How could I not? My memory of where and when I read these books has completely faded, but not the content. The books left such a huge impression on me that I can still remember many of the endings from this particular book. For those who aren’t familiar with the series, the story is not linear. The format is second-person; the protagonist is the reader, who makes the choices as to what actions to take. After a page (or sometimes two) of prose, the reader is presented with a few choices and the page numbers which continue the story based on each choice.

For example:

If you climb on the train, turn to page 94.

If you go to the farm, turn to page 98.

If you go back into the tunnel in hopes of finding your way back to your own time, turn to page 101.

The reading level for these books is somewhere around 2nd to 4th grade. I remember reading these holding my thumbs and fingers at do-over spots. If I chose badly I wanted to go back and make different choices. I’d sometimes be marking 4 or 5 spots this way at a single time. Of course, I was violating the directions of the book, which stated that I couldn’t go back. If you want to make a different choice, you were supposed to start over. I kind of liked my way better, but it can be a pain in the ass to read with so many digits inserted into a fairly thin book.

The Cave Of Time starts you off on a hike through the Snake Canyon. A newly uncovered cave opening tempts you to explore, but it gets dark only 20 feet inside and you have to hurry back out. Strangely, the sun is no longer in the same place despite only a minute or two spent inside the cave. The choices in the story bring you back to the cave of time repeatedly, each time depositing you in a different environment, some of them terminal. You can have brief adventures in feudal times, as a Scottish fisherman, living on an island paradise, witnessing the end of the world when the sun burns the face of the earth, and after it has cooled to a dull red giant. Some choices lead you home, where in some cases your family believes what has happened to you and in some cases they don’t. And in one case, you come back home 11 years after you left, appearing the same young age to their older selves.

Title: The cave of time
Author: Edward Packard
Illlustrator: Paul Granger (Don Hedin)
Cover artist: James Warhola
Series: Choose your own adventure ; 1
Imprint / publisher: Bantam Books
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 115 p.
Publication date: July 1979
ISBN-10: 0-553-26965-8