This Library Exhibits Some Of The Greatest Books That Don’t Exist
Forget about the best books of 2024. The imaginary books on view at the Grolier Club—from The Garden of Forking Paths to The Songs of the Jabberwock—are truly timeless.
Contributor – Jonathon Keats is a writer and artist who critiques museum exhibits.
Dec 30, 2024,06:30am EST- Updated Dec 30, 2024, 06:45pm EST
When Alice tumbles through a mirror in the opening passage of Through the Looking Glass, she encounters a most unusual book. At first she can’t see how to read it. Then she realizes the writing is backward, a perfectly sensible format in a looking-glass world.
The Songs of the Jabberwock – as the book is called when seen in reflection – includes one of the most famous nonsense poems of all time. “Jabberwocky” has been translated into more than sixty languages, set to music, and even recited by the Muppets. We’re able to evoke the borogoves and slithy toves of “Jabberwocky” because Lewis Carroll was thoughtful enough to transcribe the poem in his account of Alice’s adventures. But what else is in The Songs of the Jabberwock? This question is prompted by a slender hardbound copy currently on view at the Grolier Club.
The fact that The Songs of the Jabberwock is a fictional work has not posed a problem for the Grolier. Or rather the problematic nature of showing this fictional work is the main point. Imaginary Books is an exhibition of a library that might exist but doesn’t, brought into a liminal state of being through a thrilling combination of craftmanship and imagination.
The exhibition comprises more than one hundred volumes that have been lost to history, or that were planned but never completed, or that are referenced in actual literature, each represented by a simulacrum so realistic on the exterior that the mind fills the blank pages between the covers with voluminous speculation. All of the books were created by the bibliophile Reid Byers in collaboration with numerous printers, binders, and calligraphers. Their deceptions are myriad. But as Byers explains in an essay for the exhibition catalogue, his motivation was straightforward: “the instantiation of the story”.
The stories behind many of these hypothetical tomes are well known to anyone with bibliophilia. In the category of lost books, Byers has included On Comedy, the second volume of Aristotle’s Poetics, the last known copy of which was incinerated in a fire that destroyed a Benedictine abbey in 1327. Byers has also included One Must First Endure, Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, which was stolen with his wife’s luggage in the Gare de Lyon in 1922 and never recovered. (Full disclosure: I once wrote a novel in which Hemingway’s manuscript is rediscovered and plagiarized by the writer who finds it. Fuller disclosure: My novel,Lighter Than Vanity, has only been published in Russian, a language I can’t read. Its story is now lost to me.)
In addition to books that have vanished, the Grolier exhibition includes a bracing selection of “promised” books. (This beguiling name comes from Diderot and d’Alembert’s 18th century Encyclopédie.) Represented volumes range from John Milton’s envisioned epic on King Arthur to a comedic novel that Karl Marx started at the age of 19 and destroyed before becoming the father of Marxism.
But the imaginary category is the most intriguing of all, because it takes liminality to the limit. François Rabelais is represented by The Decretals of the University of Paris on the Liberty of Décolletage in Young Women and On the Usefulness of Long Codpieces, both of which are listed in his catalogue of the great library at the Abbey of Saint-Victor in Gargantua and Pantagruel. Vladimir Nabokov is represented by An Abbreviated History of English Poetry, attributed to Humbert Humbert, and The Lady Who Loved Lightning, attributed to Clare Quilty, both mentioned in the pages of Lolita. There are also several books imagined by Jorge Luis Borges, including The Garden of Forking Paths and The Book of Sand.
The inclusion of Rabelais is less important for the books Byers has selected than for the historical role of Rabelais in the invention of the tradition continued through Byers’ project. In the 16th century, Rabelais furnished his novels with long lists of books, using the titles to satirize ecclesiastical libraries, the clergy, and religion in general. In a sense, the books were synecdoches for 16th century France. Situating them in a real abbey, Rabelais marshaled them as evidence of hypocrisy. Giving them physical form, Byers doubles down on Rabelais’ rhetorical position but also destabilizes it by materializing the books’ nonexistence.
In the case of Nabokov and Borges, the ontological status is even less settled. Humbert is a notoriously unreliable narrator, Quilty may not exist except in Humbert’s imagination, and, as for Borges, the books he describes have attributes that are physically impossible. Comparatively speaking, the looking glass world of Songs of the Jabberwock is remarkably grounded.
The Grolier Club has billed Byers’ project as conceptual art installation, but it would be more accurate to describe his simulacra as a form of literature. This is most obvious when considering the metafictional games he plays when he riffs upon Nabokov and Borges and other experimental writers such as Virginia Wolff, Italo Calvino, John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut, and Umberto Eco. His instantiations of the stories continue the authors’ efforts to upset reality.
His engagements with historical authors are also best appreciated in literary terms. The literary value is perhaps best understood through a passage in Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow, one of the novels that supplies a title for Byers’ library. Tales of Knockespotch is mentioned in Crome Yellow not as a book but as a decorative spine glued to a cupboard door in a library. Prompted by a guest who wishes to read it, the owner of the library explains that “Knockespotch’s great book is like the sword Excalibur. It remains struck fast in this door, awaiting the coming of a writer with genius enough to draw it forth.”
An equivalent challenge is implicit in The Songs of the Jabberwock, The Arthuriad, and even One Must First Endure. In their tantalizing proximity to reality, each of these dummies makes space for a masterpiece that could one day be written, and can in the meantime hang on the verge of being much as “Jabberwocky” gyres and gimbles on the verge of meaning.