Edward Packard
Encyclopedia
Huntington, New York
The Town of Huntington is one of ten towns in Suffolk County, New York, USA. Founded in 1653, it is located on the north shore of Long Island in northwestern Suffolk County, with Long Island Sound to its north and Nassau County adjacent to the west. Huntington is part of the New York metropolitan...
, New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
. He is a graduate of Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
and Columbia Law School
Columbia Law School
Columbia Law School, founded in 1858, is one of the oldest and most prestigious law schools in the United States. A member of the Ivy League, Columbia Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Columbia University in New York City. It offers the J.D., LL.M., and J.S.D. degrees in...
. Packard is one of the pioneering authors of the second-person fiction style made famous by the Choose Your Own Adventure
Choose Your Own Adventure
Choose Your Own Adventure is a series of children's gamebooks where each story is written from a second-person point of view, with the reader assuming the role of the protagonist and making choices that determine the main character's actions and the plot's outcome. The series was based on a...
series of children's books.
Packard wrote one of the first known books of this type, Sugarcane Island, in 1969 and saw it first published in 1976 by Vermont Crossroads Press owned by Constance Cappel and Raymond A. Montgomery, Jr. He explains in the foreword
Foreword
A foreword is a piece of writing sometimes placed at the beginning of a book or other piece of literature. Written by someone other than the primary author of the work, it often tells of some interaction between the writer of the foreword and the book's primary author or the story the book tells...
to the book that he developed what he originally called "the adventures of you" fiction format while trying to think up interesting bedtime stories for his three children (Andrea, Caroline and Wells). In Sugarcane Island, the shipwrecked reader travels around the titular island avoiding dangers at every turn. Many of the possible endings feature an unfortunate demise, although escape from the island is possible if the correct choices are made.
The Adventures of You on Sugarcane Island was the exact prototype for books in Bantam’s classic Choose Your Own Adventure series. In 1969, and 1970, the William Morris Agency
William Morris Agency
WME is the largest talent agency in the world, with offices in Beverly Hills, New York City, Nashville, London, and Miami. WME represents elite artists from all facets of the entertainment industry, including motion pictures, television, music, theatre, publishing, and physical production...
submitted the book on Packard's behalf to several major publishers, all of whom rejected it. In 1976 Packard was able to get the book published by Vermont Crossroads Press. In its review of the book, Publishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly, aka PW, is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers and literary agents...
called it "an original idea, well carried out."
In 1977-1978, Lippincott published Packard's next two books in the same format, Deadwood City and The Third Planet from Altair. Their covers alerted readers to their unusual nature with the rubrics "Choose Your Own Adventure in the Wild West" and "Choose Your Own Adventure in Outer Space."
Seeing potential in Packard's idea of an "interactive book", Bantam Books
Bantam Books
Bantam Books is an American publishing house owned entirely by Random House, the German media corporation subsidiary of Bertelsmann; it is an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group. It was formed in 1945 by Walter B. Pitkin, Jr., Sidney B. Kramer, and Ian and Betty Ballantine...
launched a series called Choose Your Own Adventure in 1979. This contact with Bantam Books was made by Constance Cappel on a flight to the Atlanta ABA Conference with the then Head of Marketing, Jack Romano. Vermont Crossroads Press has first sold the rights to the series to Pocket Books and then transferred to Bantam. Packard wrote the first of the series, The Cave of Time, a time-traveling story in which the reader explores a cavern that is a portal to different eras. Along with R. A. Montgomery
R. A. Montgomery
Raymond Almiran Montgomery is an American author and key figure in the Choose Your Own Adventure interactive children's book series.-Career:...
, he wrote many of the books and contributed over 60 titles by the end of the series in 1998.
Packard kept the series fresh by changing genres with each title. In addition to the time travel story of the first book, he followed up with the next half-dozen stories based on suspense, spy fiction, space opera, western, mystery, science fiction, and fantasy. Packard himself even appears, in a case of self-insertion
Self-insertion
Self-insertion is a literary device in which an author character who is the real author of a work of fiction appears as a character within that fiction, either overtly or in disguise....
, in the Choose Your Own Adventure book Hyperspace.
Packard was the only author to have a consistently-recurring character who appeared in many of his CYOA books. A scientist named Dr. Nera Vivaldi frequently appeared as a friend to the reader character. She seemed to be ageless as she appeared in stories set in many time frames, including those that took the reader into outer space, although in later books, she does appear to have aged at least into her fifties. In the aforementioned Hyperspace, Dr. Vivaldi makes an appearance that actually breaches the fourth wall
Fourth wall
The fourth wall is the imaginary "wall" at the front of the stage in a traditional three-walled box set in a proscenium theatre, through which the audience sees the action in the world of the play...
.
Packard also conceived of the idea and wrote the prototype books for three more interactive series: Space Hawks and Escape, both published by Bantam Books, and Earth Inspectors, published by McGraw Hill. He also wrote a non-fiction book about the size and scale of space and time, titled Imagining the Universe and published by Berkley in 1994, which was cited by Scientific American
Scientific American
Scientific American is a popular science magazine. It is notable for its long history of presenting science monthly to an educated but not necessarily scientific public, through its careful attention to the clarity of its text as well as the quality of its specially commissioned color graphics...
as one of the best science books for young readers of the year and by National Public Radio as one of the best science books of the year. His educational math book Big Numbers, published by Millbrook in 2000, was cited by Newsweek
Newsweek
Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...
as one of the best children's books of the year. The six books in the Space Hawks series, dealing with Earth's defense against space aliens, were published in mainland China in 2004 in anticipation of China's first manned space mission.
In 2010, Packard started a new company called U-Ventures, which began releasing Choose Your Own Style adventure type applications for iPhone and iPad. The first title, "Return to the Cave of Time" was released in August, with "Through the Black Hole" scheduled for release in September.