In praise of three ‘unimportant’ books
Delving into the unusual worlds of Reid Byers’s “Imaginary Books,” Paul Valéry’s “Monsieur Teste” and “The Anthologist’s Folly,” edited by Johnny Mains.
January 3, 2025 at 11:00 a.m. EST
Review by Michael Dirda
To broadly generalize, books can be divided into three sorts. First, there are the established classics, works central to our culture and imagination such as Plato’s dialogues, Shakespeare’s plays and Jane Austen’s novels. Second, there are the books that speak to us at this moment, that are topical, relevant, part of ongoing national and societal conversations. The range here is vast, encompassing current bestsellers, modern children’s literature, contemporary poetry, self-help guides, political tracts and much else. All these works are at least tacitly therapeutic; they aim to help us enjoy, escape from or critique the way we live now.
Finally, there is a third category comprising all those idiosyncratic, half-forgotten or “unimportant” books that simply attract us personally. Seldom canonical, though often old, and of doubtful contemporary pertinence, they chiefly appeal to people who like reading in and of itself. Let me mention three examples, all recently published but quite different.
Reid Byers’s “Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books” is an annotated catalogue for a current exhibition at New York’s bibliophilic Grolier Club. Works in the show, which runs until Feb. 15, include highly desirable editions of Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labour’s Won,” the “Necronomicon” of Abdul Al-Hazred, Lord Byron’s memoirs, Harriet Vane’s “Death in the Pot,” “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and even Louise Brooks’s “Naked on My Goat,” the silent-film star’s tell-all memoirs.
To be clear, these are all authentic-looking simulacra, with period bindings and appropriate-seeming dust jackets enclosing books we wish existed. To increase their apparent reality, Byers provides bibliographical descriptions and notes about each work’s history and provenance. It is all a delightfully imaginative jeu d’esprit, and the catalogue itself is a handsome piece of bookmaking. Later printings will doubtless correct several misspellings, such as “Robert Block” instead of Robert Bloch, and insert the missing M in Rosie M. Banks, whose various shopgirl romances, alluded to in the comic novels of P.G. Wodehouse, are meant to suggest those of Ruby M. Ayres and Ethel M. Dell. Picky, picky, I know. Still only one fact really matters: “Imaginary Books” is as learnedly entertaining as Byers’s earlier study, “The Private Library,” was exhaustive and magisterial.