Seventeenth journey. The gondola of the balloon Jean-Bart, in the middle of an ice cloud.
From Histoire de mes ascensions (Story of my balloon ascents), by Gaston Tissandier, Paris, 1880.
(Source: archive.org)
If I was a famous author I would publish a book with ten different endings which all went to print with varying degrees of rarity, but not tell the fans about it so that I could watch their confusion as they disagree over how the story ended. Then when they figured it out I would ‘come clean’, telling them that I had released eleven alternate endings and watch them panic again as they all try to find the last ending.
Brilliant!
Photographs by Ivan Forde represent the process that the reader’s mind goes through when reading Milton’s Paradise Lost.




