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.
A rare copy of Jonathan Strange’s ur-text on English magic.
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.”
A true Hitchhiker’s Guide, care of Arthur Dent.
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.
