The forerunner of our digital age, a French poem about a shipwreck published in 1897, with its mind-bending possibilities of being read up and down, backwards and forwards, even sideways, launched modernism. Stephane Mallarmes One Toss of the Dice has for over a century tantalised everyone from physicists to composers to graphic artists. R. Howard Bloch decodes the poem still considered among the most enigmatic ever written. Creating a shimmering portrait of Belle-epoque Paris with a cast of exotic charactersNapoleon III, the Lumiere brothers, Auguste Rodin, Berthe Morisot, even an expatriate American dentist, Bloch positions Mallarme as the spiritual giant of late-nineteenth-century France. Featuring a new translation of the poem by J.D. McClatchy, One Toss of the Dice reveals how a masterpiece shaped our perceptual world.