The History of Text Generation

The Ancient Romans did it with Virgil;  Rabelais, writing in the sixteenth century, has Pantagruel and Panurge give it a try:

But “lottery books” (or “lossbuchs”, since they were particularly popular in Germany) are a different thing: a book deliberately intended for use in foretelling the future, full of poems and sentences and fragments and advice. Jessen Lee Kelly’s Renaissance Futures summarises the most popular methods as:

Kelly recounts as an example a 1523 book with a volvelle where the pointer was a unicorn with a horn; wherever the unicorn horn stopped, it would direct you to a passage that would answer your question. For example, here’s a poem originally by Niccolò da Lucca in “Cynosura Mariana”, as revised by  Juan Caramuel de Lobkowitz in the seventeenth century:

Like the zairja it’s not a volvelle, quite, since the circles don’t actually rotate – but it’s clearly created in a context where people are familiar with volvelles.

Source: mathesonmarcault.com