Shredded Hash - Lloyd and Myrtis Litman

Several years after the 1962 publication of Instant Hash by Lloyd Litman and Rickey Holden, Shredded Hash was created by Litman and his wife, Myrtis. An unusual aid for callers seeking choreographic variety, the book's pages were divided in three sections so that each section could be turned independently. The top section gave a series of calls that moved dancers from a basic square to a particular starting formation. The middle section gave a series of calls that started from that formation and returned the dancers to that same place, a sequence that was called a "zero" because it made no change in the dancers' formation. The third section gave a series of calls that would return the dancers back to the basic square formation in which they had started. By picking different combinations of pages, the authors explained, a caller could create 1,296 variations.