Livres Imaginaires, Reid Byers’ exhibition of Imaginary Books, is a collection of volumes that live only in other books: lost, unwritten, or fictitious books that have no physical existence. The difficulties associated with exhibiting a non-existent collection cannot easily be overstated. In addition to the purely ontological considerations involved, the mechanics of presenting to the public a series of objects that cannot possibly be on show present a broad spectrum of curatorial challenges.
There are three kinds of imaginary books. Lost books once really existed but have disappeared completely in the distant past: Aristotle’s Comœdy (the deadly book in The Name of the Rose), Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Won, the sequel to LLL, or Hemingway’s One Must First Endure, his first novel, the manuscript that Hadley left on a train in Paris.
Unwritten Books are books that authors tried unsuccessfully to write: Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, whose writing was interrupted by a “person from Porlock”. Sylvia Plath’s unpublished Double Exposure, left unfinished at her death, or the abandoned comic novel Scorpion and Felix by the young Karl Marx.
Fictional Books are books that appear only in stories. The Murder of Gonzago is Hamlet’s play-within-a-play. The Diseases of Seamen, its spine resewn in sailcloth in the 1840’s, is Dr. Maturin’s great work in the Jack Aubrey books. Tolkien’s beautiful Yénonótie, bound in malorn leaf and stamped in mithril, can be found only in the Silmarilion, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy can be consulted only in the eponymous novel.
Also on display are some large folios: Mr. Pickwick’s first speech to the Pickwick Club, and Panurge’s great work On the Utility of Long Codpieces, with illustrations, several charts, and two codpieces tipped in. There is an edition of the Strand Magazine that includes Dr. Watson’s legendary “The Giant Rat of Sumatra”, and sealed forever in a Wells Fargo strong box is John Dee’s copy of the Necronomicon (HPL 5), on loan from the library of Mixatonic University.
