Impossibly

A hand holding a small blue book with the word Impossible crossed out on the cover.

It’s funny the mythology things can acquire over time. I was recently alerted that a copy of Facebook’s infamous Red Book (aka The Book of Hack) sold on eBay for $1000 and was subsequently scanned and released publicly as a downloadable PDF. I’m not going to link to that because, well, lawyers1, but it got me thinking about another little book that was made around the same time and I’m guessing few even know about — the Impossible book (aka The Blue Book).

The Impossible book is a bit of an alternate (and in some ways sanitized) version of the Red Book which was handed out to potential hires as part of their on-site interview loop and produced just one time, so few copies ever existed and I’d bet, fewer still are floating around out there.

This is the real rarity of books from the Analog Research Lab. Obviously I have a copy2.

Footnotes

  1. There’s a lot of history around the Red Book and stories that few know. I was around at Facebook/Meta long enough to become the guardian (for lack of a better term) of the book after Ben and Tim left the company and I did as much as I could to protect the integrity of it during that time. I have all five editions of the Red Book in my archive. Most probably don’t know there were that many before we made the decision to retire the book in 2018. ↩
  2. Before anyone asks, no, I won’t be releasing a downloadable version or scanning the book. I don’t need to anyway because for both books, I have all the original files.