How can a single book contain a hundred thousand billion poems?

In 1961, the French poet Raymond Queneau published a book of exactly ten sonnets, called Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes, or One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems. But each page was sliced into fourteen horizontal strips, one per line, and because all ten sonnets share not just the same rhyme scheme but the same rhyme sounds, any line can be combined with the lines of the nine others. Do the arithmetic across fourteen lines with ten choices each, and the book technically contains 10 to the power of 14 distinct sonnets. Queneau himself calculated that reading every single one would take about 200 million years.

The book even helped give birth to Oulipo: when Queneau ran into trouble making it, he asked the mathematician François Le Lionnais for help, and in the process the two launched this 1960 collective of mostly French-speaking writers and mathematicians, created to explore what they called littérature potentielle: new structures and patterns that any writer could pick up and use. Rather than waiting for inspiration, Oulipo members deliberately invented rules, or constraints, and then wrote inside them, documenting each method so other writers could borrow it. Queneau had a memorable description for what his group was doing: they were "rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape."

Some constraints are famous on their own, like the lipogram, a text that avoids a particular letter entirely, which Oulipo member Georges Perec used to write A Void, a 300-page novel without the letter e. Others are stranger: the S+7 technique replaces every noun in a sentence with the seventh noun after it in a dictionary, turning 'Call me Ishmael' into something closer to nonsense poetry, while a 'snowball' poem adds one letter to each successive line.

For Queneau, these rules weren't a cage; they were a machine for generating ideas he wouldn't have found otherwise. Fellow Oulipian Georges Perec built an entire 'story-making machine' out of constraints to construct his sprawling novel Life: A User's Manual, and the group's reputation eventually crossed the Atlantic when Martin Gardner featured Oulipo in his Scientific American column in 1977, introducing its wordplay to American readers.