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Reid Byers book, Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books, is in press at Oak Knoll for a second printing, with corrections.

Many books exist, but many more don’t. Why does a book come about? There’s ego, politics, the human condition, man’s yearning for understanding. Books fail to exist for the same reasons. Authors destroy books because of ego. Emperors destroy them because of politics. Books get lost because of misunderstandings: Hemingway’s partially completed first novel vanished after he asked his wife to meet him in Lausanne with the manuscript. She assumed that he wanted the carbon copies, too, and threw everything in a suitcase, which got stolen from a train. Unwritten books also result from the human condition, specifically from its tendency toward inertia: no one ever got around to writing them. Sometimes books go extinct because of the short shelf life of papyrus.

For fifteen years, Reid Byers, a former systems designer at I.B.M., has been collecting books that don’t exist. Byers used to amuse himself by coming up with fake books to put on fake shelves that disguised a hidden door in his home library. (This pastime is not as unusual as you might think; Dickens’s library contained “On the Horse,” by Lady Godiva, and “Cats’ Lives (Vol IX).”) Byers explained, “The first one I picked was Aristotle’s Poetics—Volume II,” which dealt with comedy, and once actually existed. He made a book cover as an homage, or a parody. “I thought it was really funny,” he said. “I just couldn’t stop.”

Byers’s collection, comprising a hundred and fourteen (fake) books, is currently on display at the Grolier Club, in midtown, along with an accompanying (real) book, written by Byers. Both are called “Imaginary Books.” It’s an impressive collection—Sappho, Shakespeare, Woolf, Poe, Le Guin. Byers was in town, from Portland, Maine. He sat in an armchair in the club’s library, wearing a brown tweed blazer over a green sweater, and offered a tour.

The collection consists of physical copies designed by Byers. “I have what I call the five-second rule,” he said. “They have to fool an expert for five seconds and a civilian indefinitely.” He didn’t invent any books. All formerly existed, were never finished, or were found within other works, such as the play in “Hamlet,” which Byers has in his collection. First stop: Homer’s third epic, the Margites. “It’s about this bonehead who keeps getting in trouble,” Byers said. “He’s Lucille Ball.” Byers’s version had a paper dust jacket, torn at the corners. In a vitrine on the opposite wall was a comedy by Karl Marx (“Not Groucho!”), who is believed to have later burned it. Byers paused in front of another book. “This is one of my favorites: ‘Shakespeare in Baby Talk,’ ” he said—envisioned, but never completed, by Raymond Chandler. “The best play in it is ‘As Ums Wikes It.’ ” In another room was a copy of the play “The Lady Who Loved Lightning,” by Clare Quilty, a dramatist character in the memoirs of Humbert Humbert, which itself makes up most of “Lolita”—a play within a book within a book. “But, because Humbert is an unreliable narrator, Quilty may not exist at all,” Byers said. “And if that is true, then this is, I think, the unique occurrence of an imaginary book written by a character who does not exist even in the book of origin, and so is doubly imaginary.” (In Stanley Kubrick’s “Lolita”—a film of the book about the book that contains the play—Quilty does exist, and is played by Peter Sellers.)

Byers created his fake books by modifying actual ones. He enlisted helpers, including two bookbinders, a letterpresser, and a specialty calligrapher. “Some of it’s just, you know, careful Photoshopping,” he said. To impart a weathered look, he continued, “we just kicked them around on the floor.”

He sourced several old specimens, secondhand, from the library of a nunnery. He used one for “On the Usefulness of Long Codpieces,” from Rabelais’s “Gargantua and Pantagruel.” He also procured a codpiece for display from a maker in California. “That’s her full-time job,” Byers said. “She’d never made a fourteen-inch one before.”

The tour continued: Sylvia Plath’s last novel, unfinished when she died. Byron’s memoirs, burned after his death. What exists of Coleridge’s masterpiece “Kubla Kahn,” which came to him all at once—“He was completely stoned,” Byers said—and was written in a trance that was ruined when someone knocked on his door.

Byers, who is seventy-seven, owns many real books, too. He wrote a book on private libraries. Before that, he spent time as a Presbyterian minister, a choir director, a TV announcer, and a welder. “Everything I’ve done had something to do with books,” he said. “Except welding.” For a while, he lived across the street from Toni Morrison, in Princeton. His memoir, which does not exist, might have described his time with the Navy in Vietnam, where he wrote his first book. “It was about life on a ship,” he said. “It was not a great book.” Which imaginary work does he most want to read? “Sappho,” he said. “Some things just break your heart because they aren’t real.”

Byers’s collection used to include a first edition of “Ghost Book,” by the underground Misty Poets of China. “Now, that’s an interesting book,” Byers said. To avoid censorship, the poets published it using a mimeograph machine and wallpaper paste. “They went out one night and wallpapered Beijing with the book. The first edition was destroyed by the rain or the authorities and doesn’t exist . . . I thought. And then I found that one of the poets had kept a mimeographed copy.” What did Byers do with his own? “I destroyed it,” he said. ♦Published in the print edition of the February 10, 2025, issue, with the headline “Invisible Ink.”

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.

Editors’ Pick

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.

Jonathon Keats

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 18^th 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 16^th 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 16^th 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.

A bibliophile invites New Yorkers to engage with books that do not exist

A unique and artful exhibition of imaginary books is now on view at the Grolier Club

Marisa Charpentier

20 December 2024

To the casual viewer, the books on display in the second-floor gallery of the Grolier Club in Midtown Manhattan look like an impressive collection of rare tomes—not unusual fare for the bibliophilic society. There is a worn Ernest Hemingway, a collection of Sappho poems, and an eerie-looking Sylvia Plath cover. Some bear author names that perhaps sound only vaguely familiar: Harriet Vane, Samuel Pickwick, Orlando.

Visitors roam the gallery, eyeing the delicate volumes enclosed in glass cases. Every few minutes, someone giggles. They get the joke: none of these books is real.

The exhibition, Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books (until 15 February 2025),is the brainchild of the writer and bibliophile Reid Byers. Along with a team of bookbinders and artists, Byers brought to life more than 100 books that he describes as “some of the greatest non-existent works in all of literature”. These include works lost to history, like Lord Byron’s memoirs, which were famously burned upon his death, and books that exist only in fiction, like The Songs of the Jabberwock from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy from the eponymous series.

Byron said that his memoirs presented “the evils, moral and physical, of true dissipation”. The manuscript was burned at his orders by John Murray, his publisher, and John Cam Hobhouse in the fireplace of Murray’s shop at Albemarle Street. Only 23 people were permitted to read it. This biblioclasm has been called “the greatest literary crime in history”.Photo: Reid Byers

The works may only be simulacra, but Byers did not make them up. “There’s no way to fake the imaginary,” Shira Buchsbaum, the exhibitions manager at the Grolier Club, tells The Art Newspaper. “These books exist in some plane of being.”

Byers became interested in the idea of imaginary books about 15 years ago, when he was building a jib door in his home library. The hidden doors, which date back to 18th-century European country houses, were originally designed to blend in with walls so that servants could come and go unobtrusively. In the library room, jib doors were covered with book spines and strips of wood that matched the bookcases. Oftentimes, the family would come up with funny book titles to write on the spines. “When I tried to do that,” Byers says, “I got excited about the idea of using books that were lost or didn’t exist.”

Byers began curating a vast list of imaginary books that spans genres and history. The books fit into three categories: lost (books with no surviving copy), unfinished (almost completed but never published, or thought of but never written) and fictive (existing only inside the realm of a novel).

But it was not satisfying to just have false book spines on his jib door. Byers wanted the physical objects. “That’s the experience that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck,” he says, so he endeavoured to bring these books into the three-dimensional world.

After its stint at the Grolier Club, Byers’s collection will travel to the Book Club of California in San Francisco (17 March-13 July). He also chronicles the project in his very real book, Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works, out next month

Though Byers does not consider himself an artist, the exhibitionis indeed a work of art. Examining his collection, patrons encounter The Octarine Fairy Book, a children’s book that appears in Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic. It is bound in the fictional, magical colour octarine, “said to be visible only to wizards and cats”, reads a placard beside the book.

On another shelf sits a sickly looking copy of Death in the Pot, one of the mystery books penned by Dorothy Sayers’s protagonist Harriet Vane in Strong Poison. The book is wrapped in a green- and red-splotched cloth—supposedly traces of arsenic and cyanide.

Across the room, there is a non-existent work of nonfiction called Thoughts on the Prevention of the Diseases most usual among Seamen, which is referenced in Patrick O’Brian’s Desolation Island. Byers’s “severely stained” copy has a spine allegedly made of sailcloth.

“This exhibition could encourage anyone to dive down any number of rabbit holes,” Buchsbaum says.

Installation view of Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books at the Grolier Club, ManhattanCourtesy the Grolier Club

It is hard to resist the urge to break open the gallery cases and see what lies within the books. Doing so, though, would only reveal blank pages or the text of another book entirely. “The problem with imaginary books like this is they are magic,” Byers explains with a grin. “If you were to try to force one open, it would protect itself by turning into another book.”

But the temptation is the point. Each book brings the beholder to a liminal threshold, the space between this world and another. These moments happen in books all the time, Byers says, like “when Alice notices there’s a rabbit with a weskit, or when Lucy stumbles through the wardrobe, or when the monster’s finger twitches because it’s alive”.

In an imaginary library, visitors are invited to conjure any number of parallel universes. What if one could see the colour of magic, or step through the looking glass? What if Hemingway’s manuscripts for his first novel had not been stolen on a train in France that fateful day in 1922?

“What would it mean if we knew what Aristotle thought was funny?” Byers adds, noting that the Greek philosopher’s treatise on comedy was lost in antiquity. We may never know. “But,” he says, “I have a nice copy of it.”

• Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books, Grolier Club, until 15 February 2025

The Hub

Move over, Alexandria: A new exhibit features lost, imagined, and totally fake books.

By Brittany Allen

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December 16, 2024, 2:25pm

For the next few months in New York City, book nerds with a penchant for esoterica can enjoy a special treat.

The Grolier Club, “America’s oldest and largest society for bibliophiles and enthusiasts in the graphic arts,” is currently hosting a (free!) exhibition built of books that do not, technically, exist.

Curated by Club member Reid Byers and described—by its own wall copy—as both a “collection of imaginary books” and a “post-structuralist conceptual art installation,” the exhibit includes simulacra, parodies, and lots of cheeky easter eggs for the well-read. Viewers can peep the lovingly crafted jackets of lost books, complete with framing copy. Though the insides, of course, remain a mystery.

Books are lumped into a few different categories. There are the “Lost Books,” like Hemingway’s famously misplaced One Must First Endure. Then there are hypothetical, alleged drafts, referenced but never read—like Shakespeare’s dubious sequel, Love’s Labour’s Won. 

But the real gold resides—for this viewer, anyway—in the “Fictive Fiction” section, which features books referenced in other books.Curator copy is often unflinching in this part of the exhibit, and quick to explain why a certain manuscript may have never seen the light of day. For instance, the Reverend Edward Casaubon (of Middlemarch)’s behemoth, A Key To All Mythologies is described as “astonishingly boring.”A first edition of the (fake) fiction, The Lady Who Loved Lightning.

Then there are the famously unfinished books. In this corner of the exhibit, Samuel Coleridge’s Kubla Khan at last sees the light of binding. As does Karl Marx’s short-lived poetic experiment, Scorpion and Felix—which the great thinker apparently burned in a fire before it could tarnish his legacy.

Moving into the main hall, one can find useful reference texts, like The Bene Gesserit Code and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy filed under “Non-Existent Non-Fiction.”

Elsewhere, Borges, that first fake librarian, is name-checked. A copy of “his” Don Quijote is featured in the collection, nestled in among the grimoires and imaginary histories. Also The Garden of Forking Paths, a text first mentioned in his Ficciones.

If you’re curious about the sort of person inclined to create a fake library in this day and age, you wouldn’t be wrong to picture an eccentric with certain Thomas Crown characteristics. As Sophie Haigney reported in The New York Times, collection curator Reid Byers “started thinking about imaginary books 15 years ago, when he was having a jib door—a door disguised as part of a wall of bookshelves—made for his private library.”

The reigning President of the New England bibliophiles’ Baxter Society, Byers has long been a zealot for libraries of all sizes. He apparently built his public lark with the commissioned help of “two bookbinders, a letterpress printer, a calligrapher and a magician.”

During my visit to the Grolier Club on a frigid Friday afternoon, I overheard a spirited debate between two patrons who couldn’t seem to settle on the layers of meta-fiction present. “But this one’s real, surely?” one woman cried, of a hardback attributed to Peter and Katherine Sherritt Sagamore. “I’m afraid not,” her companion replied, tapping the glass case. For on inspection, these Tidewater Tales were in fact an intertextual allusion from the mind of author John Barth. The fake book, a “jointly authored, mise-en-âbime” is referenced in his real novel…The Tidewater Tales.

Another visitor toggling between bewilderment and delight was inspired to wonder aloud, Causabon-style, about the existential nature of IP. “You know Arcadia the play was supposedly a rip-off of A.S. Byatt’s Possession?” he asked the room. Amusingly, the man was standing in front of a display featuring fictional books from both those properties: Hannah Jarvis’ The Genius of the Place (first referenced in Top Stoppard’s Arcadia), and a copy of The Fairy Melusine (from Possession). That’s to say that for a moment in space-time, we were all arguably paying homages to an homage of an homage of an homage.

The Grolier Club will host the Imaginary Books through February 15th. After that—rejoice, West Coast—the exhibit heads to San Francisco, where it will be displayed at the Book Club of California.

Eventually, per the catalog copy, the books will return to a permanent home a the Le Club Fortsas in Paris.

Though that bibliophiles’ society may be another fiction. If Google Maps is to be believed.

  Lithub Daily

December 16, 2024

‘These are magic books’: bringing imaginary works of literature to life

A whimsical new exhibition assembles a range of books that don’t exist, from Byron’s destroyed memoirs to Shakespeare’s lost play

At a small, unassuming exhibit in midtown Manhattan, you can see the lost translation of Homer’s single comic epic, judge the art design on Sylvia Plath’s unpublished manuscript Double Exposure – squabbled over by her mother and husband Ted Hughes, it supposedly disappeared in 1970 – or examine the one remaining copy of Aristotle’s Poetics II: On Comedy, the influential treatise on theater thought to have burned at a Benedictine Abbey in 1327 (at least, according to Umberto Eco’s 1980 novel The Name of the Rose). The extremely rare collection of books, on display at the Grolier Club until 15 February, spans texts from ancient Greece to 20,000 years in the future, when the Book of the Bene Gesserit populated the libraries of Dune. The one commonality? None of them exist.

Or, rather, they exist only in the realm of the imaginary. The poems of Sappho, Dylan Thomas’s abandoned manuscript Llareggub, the nested books from Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night, a Traveler – all are lost to time or limited to fiction. That they are seen in our world at all is thanks to Reid Byers, the creator and curator of the Imaginary Books collection, who imagined what these books might look like, should we be able to perceive them. “It takes a certain suspension of disbelief to even consider having an exhibition of the imaginary,” said Byers, a multi-hyphenate bibliophile who has also worked as a Presbyterian minister, a welder and a C language programmer, on a recent tour of the exhibition.

Suspend it, and you can enjoy the most extensive and tangible collection of the imaginary – by definition, the rarest of books – to date. Many have tried to collect them, usually in list form. Occasionally, they have decorated a jib door – a servants’ door flush with the wall and disguised by the “spines” of simulacra books, usually with comedic titles (The Scottish Boccaccio by D Cameron, for example). But Byers’s collection goes a step further — as if “you were to open that jib door and step into a secret room”, he said. “If you went in and looked at that, and if the liminality is propitious, you can see all the way to Wonderland.”

The exhibition begins with the aspirational, speculative and more easily imagined – what would Hemingway’s first novel look like, had it not been stolen from his wife Hadley at the Gare de Lyon in 1924? What if Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Won survived past 1610? Such lost books are distinct from the unfinished, which is subdivided into the categories of: destroyed (Byron’s memoir, burned by his wife in what has been called the greatest crime in literary history); orphaned; abandoned; thought out; conjectural; and proposed (such as Raymond Chandler’s threat to write Shakespeare in Baby Talk, which Byers rendered as a white-bound children’s book with a disconcertingly dark baby bard on the cover).

An exhibition disclaimer warns: “The sheer mechanics of presenting to the public a series of objects that cannot possibly be on display present a broad spectrum of curatorial challenges, only some of which have been completely overcome.” Such challenges are toughest for the largest category of non-existent books: fictive works, or books that exist only in other books. This includes Rules & Traffic Regulations That May Not Be Bent or Broken, a driver’s handbook mentioned in Norman Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, which looks much like a traveler’s manual from the 1960s. Or The Songs of the Jabberwock, bound in purple and printed backwards, “pretty much as Alice found it sitting right inside the mirror”, said Byers. A copy of Nymphs and Their Ways, glanced by Lucy on Mr Tumnus’s shelf in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, decorated with a Romantic-era painting of bathing women. And a maroon-colored version of The Lady Who Loved Lighting by Clare Quilty, who was murdered by Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita – though, as Humbert Humbert is a famously unreliable narrator, we don’t really know if she even existed. It’s a unique specimen of the collection – “a book written by a character who does not exist, even in the book of origin. So it’s doubly imaginary,” Byers explained.

Imaginary Books is, as you can imagine, a very elaborate and whimsical bit taken to its most creative extremes. Byers, a good-natured expert on private libraries and rabbit holes, began with a list of about 400 imaginary book titles, about half historical and half fictive. “No one can make a complete list of fictional books unless they have read all of the literature,” he noted, though one can try. Byers eventually narrowed the list to 114 titles on display. “Part of the decision as to whether to ‘find’ a book rests on, can I or someone on my team envision what it should look like?” he explained. Easier when the book in question is a lost work by the Roman historian Suetonius, less so when it’s The Octarine Fairy Book, a specimen that is supposed to be the color of magic – only visible to wizards and cats – as per the novel by Terry Pratchett. (The replica is a shimmering, iridescent blue and gold that gives the impression of a color you can’t pin down.)

Byers designed about half of the collection, along with the ideas and craftsmanship of letterpress artist Martha Kearsley, calligrapher Margo Dittmer and historical bookbinding expert Jeff Altepeter – “they all get the gag,” said Byers. As for what’s actually in the books – arranged and stylized like a true rare books display, down to faux provenance and classifications – well, that depends who you ask. Byers first answers in character: “These are magic books. They are held in existence in the case only by a carefully balanced ontological tension. And for technical, thaumaturgical reasons, they cannot be opened. If you were to open one, it would protect itself by turning into something else.” Or you could say, he added, that about half the books are blank inside, and the rest have some other text within their bindings.

Imaginary Books is, as Byers will concede, a true and sincere gag, down to its listed “sponsorship” by the Mountweazel Foundation in Faraway Hills, New York. (A mountweazel being, of course, a term for a fake entry in a reference work, usually planted to catch copyright infringement.) But that doesn’t make this collection of 114 works – well, 113, as Juan Villoro’s self-descriptive The Wild Book has escaped – any less real. “It feels real in a very different way,” said Byers. “And that’s why some of them can give you a little stand-up hair at the back of your neck. It’s the feeling of ‘oh, how I wish I could open that’.”

• Imaginary Books is on display at the Grolier Club in New York City until 15 February 2025

Literary anniversaries, Sherlock Holmes in the pub, Clare Quilty at the Grolier

By M. C.

For the benefit of the literary journalists amid our readers, we like to turn at this time of year to survey the coming round of bookish anniversaries – those beguiling opportunities for today’s would-be lions to roar in honour of their mighty forebears. Or perhaps to snarl at them in disapproval? The would-be lion must move with the times, after all.

Round numbers are easiest for the beleaguered commissioning editor to contemplate. Tempt her with a century of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (published in April 1925) and, likewise, a century of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (May). Also worth consideration, and of the same vintage: “The Hollow Men” by T. S. Eliot and The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein. Ought you to mention Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler – or retreat to Carry On, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse? The two together, perhaps. Either way, don’t forget that 2025 is also a century on from the births of Gerald Durrell, Yukio Mishima, Flannery O’Connor, William Styron and Gore Vidal – to name but a significant few.

Eighteenth-century experts: there’s always Alexander Pope’s edition of Shakespeare and the first volumes of his translation of the Odyssey (both 1725); though neither might be reckoned to be Pope at his best. The Romanticist may have more luck with The Spirit of the Age by William Hazlitt; and maybe there is still a little to be said about the first edition of Pepys’s Diary, edited by Lord Braybrooke.

Eventually, alas, the littérateur may have to look up the publications of fifty years ago. Dust down your paperback of The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury or High-Rise by J. G. Ballard; prepare to make a case for Charles Bukowski’s Factotum or John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Away from the chaps, 1975 happens to have been the year of Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, The Female Man by Joanna Russ and Corregidora by Gayl Jones. Not bad going?

Presumably we have overlooked some author or work of awful importance; our readers will kindly tell us so. We can only plead that we are fully aware that John Buchan was born on August 26, 1875, mere weeks after the birth of Edmund Clerihew Bentley (July 10), who was not only the inventor of the clerihew but the author of three volumes of the things.

And no, we have not forgotten that a certain Jane Austen was born almost 250 years ago, on December 16, 1775. Jane Austen’s House in Chawton reminded us of this fact when it opened a new permanent exhibition, Jane Austen and the Art of Writing, back in October. There is a year to go until the novelist’s bicentenary, but the museum’s celebrations will run throughout the year. There will be mini-festivals devoted to Pride and Prejudice in January, Sense and Sensibility in May, Emma in July and Persuasion in September. If there was an announcement about Mansfield Park, we missed it. Has it been overlooked? All the better, if so, for the critic who yearns to make a case for its obvious superiority.

Literary pubs have proved to be a predictably fruitful theme. This has meant pubs in fiction for the most part. G. Thomas Tanselle writes from New York to note that “in the mid-1960s I went to a pub near Charing Cross that had an exhibition of Sherlock Holmes and issued a catalogue of it”. This is the Sherlock Holmes on Northumberland Street, which, in its former guise as the Northumberland Arms, makes a guest appearance in “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor”; and it is “still flourishing”. “I wonder if my 1960s catalogue is now a rarity, and if there are other so-called themed pubs with literary themes that had exhibition catalogues and that still exist.”

East of the Embankment there are literary pubs such as Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, the Wheatsheaf and the George – but have any of them gone as far as the Sherlock Holmes in honouring regulars such as Charles Dickens, George Orwell et al? We fear not. Some, indeed, seem to place somewhat less value on these connections than others.

So could it be that the Sherlock Holmes is a unique instance? Tell us, and Mr Tanselle, if you know otherwise.

The book pictured above may or may not exist – we only have Humbert Humbert’s word for it.

In Lolita, you will recall, Vladimir Nabokov’s reliably unreliable narrator notes that his enemy Clare Quilty is the author of a book called The Lady Who Loved Lightning, written “in collaboration with Vivian Darkbloom”). Who or what Quilty is we should not say, for the sake of those who have not yet read Lolita; but the name of Quilty’s collaborator, we hope it is fair to point out, is an authorial anagram. We are all too much in the presence here of what certain literary scholars like to call the “ludic”.

Now The Lady Who Loved Lightning has taken up temporary residence at the Grolier Club in New York. Imaginary Books: Lost, unfinished and fictive works found only in other books is a witty exhibition curated by Reid Byers, the author of The Private Library: The history of the architecture and furnishing of the domestic bookroom. A “post-structuralist project”, it runs to more than 100 imaginary books, and seems to offer much to contemplate in terms of literature’s ever-flimsy hold on reality.

“Every book in the world was an imaginary book when it was first begun to be written”, Mr Byers says. It’s just that some books stay imaginary – or return to being so. Among other lost, unfinished and fictive works, his exhibition boasts “copies” of Love’s Labour’s Won (Shakespeare’s sequel to Love’s Labour’s Lost), Byron’s memoirs (condemned to John Murray’s fireplace) and Sylvia Plath’s Double Exposure (about “a wife whose husband turns out to be a deserter and philanderer”). You have until February 15 to glimpse the impossible at 47 East 60th Street.

New York Times – Dec 5, 2024

Books, Lost or Imaginary, Come to Life at the Grolier Club

An exhibition of what-ifs, designed to be seen, not read, will be on display through February. Listen to this article · 4:36 min

An early Hemingway novel as pictured by Reid Byers, in the exhibition of imaginary and lost books at the Grolier Club.Credit…From the Collection of Reid Byers. Photograph by Reid Byers.

By Sophie Haigney

Dec. 4, 2024

At the Grolier Club on the Upper East Side is an object never before displayed in public: an edition of one of Hemingway’s first novels, which was stolen when his first wife left a bag unattended on a train in 1922. The manuscript was never recovered, and the novel lost to history.

But there is a twist: The copy at the Grolier Club is itself a kind of fiction, part of an exhibition called “Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books,” curated by Reid Byers, a Maine-based collector and writer.The original manuscript of Hemingway’s book has not, alas, been rediscovered — Byers has created a simulacrum of sorts, an imagined version of “One Must First Endure.”This, along with physical representations of more than 100 books that have been lost, unfinished or dreamed up by other writers, will be on display at the Grolier Club, from Thursday through Feb. 15.

Byers started thinking about imaginary books 15 years ago, when he was having a jib door — a door disguised as part of a wall of bookshelves —made for his private library. “I started making a list of fake books and imaginary books,” Byers said. Soon, he decided he wouldn’t be satisfied with just a list: He wanted to find a way to display these books. Working with a team that included two bookbinders, a letterpress printer, a calligrapher and a magician, he commissioned and put together this library, sometimes using parts of existing books as the basis and sometimes starting from scratch. He worked on some books solo.

“These books are liminal objects,” Byers said. “They put you on the threshold just before you go down the rabbit hole.” (There is, for good measure, a version of the book Alice read in “Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.” With a cover dyed purple, its title, given by Byers, is “The Songs of the Jabberwock” and it’s printed as a mirror image.)

“When the books arrived, our executive director joked, ‘These books are surprisingly heavy for being imaginary,’” Shira Belén Buchsbaum, exhibitions manager at the Grolier Club, recalled. “I said, ‘They’re all portals into other universes, so there’s a strong gravitational weight to them.”

The books are not really meant to be opened and read; the text inside doesn’t generally correspond to the lost or fictional objects. “I like to tell people that if you open one of these books, it will protect itself by turning immediately into something else,” Byers said, slyly.

The reasons that books go missing or never get finished animate the exhibition’s witty wall text. Christopher Marlowe’s unpublished play “The Maiden’s Holiday” resurfaced more than 100 years after his death, but a cook had been using its pages to line pie tins and start fires. Nothing survived. After Lord Byron died in 1824, a group of friends burned his memoirs — which the poet had not wanted published in his lifetime because of possible scandals — in a fireplace at his publisher’s office. The wall text tells us, “This biblioclasm was called ‘the greatest literary crime in history.’”

A creation for the Grolier exhibition, Christopher Marlowe’s unpublished 16th-century play “The Maiden’s Holiday.” In real life, a cook used the manuscript pages to start fires and line pie tins. None of the pages survived.

Meanwhile, the tactile imaginary books — those dreamed up by authors in their own books — provide delightful new lenses into familiar works. Buchsbaum noted that there’s really “something in the show for everyone, and so many pathways across genre and time.” We get to see the cover of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” from the novel of the same name,displayed on a tablet, and a copy of “The Fairy Melusine,” which appears at the center of A.S. Byatt’s novel “Possession.” There is even an artifact drawn from “Lolita” — an imagined version of Humbert Humbert’s scholarly book.

Stories abound, and the objects can be playful. Wall text imagines that an edition of a mystery novel that appears in Dorothy Sayers’s “Strong Poison” is “bound in poison: the green is arsenic and the red cyanide.” In the exhibition, this brightly splotched volume appears in mannequin hands wearing surgical gloves.

After its time in New York, “Imaginary Books”will travel to the Book Club of California in San Francisco. Eventually, it will return to its permanent home, which the exhibition lists as Le Club Fortsas in Paris. The only thing? Le Club Fortsas doesn’t actually exist. The address, in the 10th Arrondissement, leads to the facade of an old house that serves to cover an air vent for the French railway system. Fitting, for an imaginary collection.

Imaginary Books

Dec. 5-Feb. 15, 2025, the Grolier Club, https://www.grolierclub.org/

A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 5, 2024, Section C, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Some What-If Books Are Brought to Life. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Art & Exhibitions

Fictional, Lost, and Unfinished Books Come to Life at This New York Show

The exhibition includes more than 100 titles.

by  Richard Whiddington November 5, 2024 Share This Article

A couple of years ago, Egyptian archaeologists excavating a necropolis south of Cairo discovered a papyrus marked with ancient Greek. Analysis eventually showed it bore Euripides’s Ino and Polyidos, two lost works, previously known only by hazy plot summaries and quoted snippets. Of the 5th-century B.C.E. playwright’s estimated 90 works only 19 survive, making the discovery among the most considerable contributions to Greek literature in half a century.

The achievement will be dwarfed if progress continues to be made on the Herculaneum scrolls, a collection of 1,800 texts that were carbonized into lumps by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in in 79 C.E. It’s a potential gold mine of writings currently absent from the classical canon and a Silicon Valley-backed competition is pushing machine learning and computer vision enthusiasts to train their focus on virtually unwrapping the texts.

The thrill, in both cases, is of a past rendered ever-so-slightly richer by the discovery of things believed lost. But what of the countless other lost, disappeared, and abandoned books? What might literature (and the world perhaps) be like if it included Homer’s lost comedy Margites or the Bible still contained the Book of the Battles of Yahweh? What might it be like to stand in a room of these books? These are among the historical counterfactuals explored in an upcoming exhibition at New York’s Grolier Club, America’s oldest society for bibliophiles.

Set to run from December through February 2025, club member Reid Byers has been handed the curatorial keys for “Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books.” It’s the grand extension of a thought experiment Byers has been toying with for some time and arrives courtesy of thorough collaborations with printers, bookbinders, artists, and calligraphers.

Byers has given life to more than 100 books and will spread them around the Grolier’s cozy second floor gallery. It is, the organizers admit, part conceptual art project and part literary indulgence. Visitors are asked to judge works entirely by their covers and, in so doing, dream up the stories and characters that these the unknowable books might hold inside. In turn, we find ourselves considering the first words and keystrokes for the books we know and love.

“An encounter with an imaginary book brings us forcibly to a liminal moment, confronted with an object that we know does not exist, but then it leaves us suspended in this strange space,” Byers said in a statement. “Every book in the world was an imaginary book when it was first begun to be written.”

Byers has devised three broad criteria for “Imaginary Books.” The first, Lost Books, counts among its number William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Won, the vanished complement to Love’s Labour’s Lost; Ernest Hemmingway’s first novel that was stolen from his wife (along with its carbon copies) in Paris; and Lord Byron’s tell-all memoir that was deemed worthy of burning by his publisher in 1824.

The second, Unfinished Books, presents works that were started but never finished or published. This includes Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s opium inspired reverie Kubla Khan, Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical Double Exposure that Ted Hughes allegedly prevented being published, and Raymond Chandler’s Shakespeare in Baby Talk.

Last are Byers’ Fictive Books, which emerge from the pages of fiction to find physical form at the Grolier Club. Chief among which is The Necronomicon the toxic, forbidden tome from H.P. Lovecraft’s writings. As is canon, it appeared locked away in a heavy-set safe. You can look and speculate but, as Byers said, “the book is not to be touched.”

Richard Whiddington

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