LAWRENCE STERNE, Tristram Shandy (Horace Liveright, 1925; Black & Gold Edition, 1942)

A book that I'd always intended to read, ever since I heard about the peculiarities of Sterne's novel: 'With him a sentence does not necessarily begin with a capital letter. The ordinary marks of punctuation are discarded for dashes of varying length; and free use is made of italics, capitals, asterisks and index-hands. Sometimes a sentence forms a chapter, or a chapter is begun and broken off because it does not start right. Occasionally entire chapters drop out of place to appear many pages on, as if they had got lost in a shuffle. A page may be left blank so that the reader may write upon it anything he likes, or it may be dressed in black in memory of Yorick. There is also a marbled page, inserted, Sterne remarks, as "a motley emblem of my book".' (from the introduction by Wilbur L. Cross.
An experimental book avant la lettre! Finally, a couple of years ago I bought a decent 2nd hand copy in London for £2.50, but ended up (so far) reading only 10 pages.