A new exhibition on view at The Grolier Club next month will be part conceptual art installation and part bibliophilic entertainment, featuring a collection of books that do not really exist.
On view from December 5 through February 15, 2025, Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books presents an alternative library that encourages speculation on some of the major “what ifs” of bibliographic history.
Curated by Grolier Club member Reid Byers from his own collection, the exhibition includes more than 100 imaginary books such as lost texts that have no surviving example, unfinished books, and fictive works that exist only in story. All of the “books” are simulacra meticulously created by Byers with a team of printers, bookbinders, artists, and calligraphers.
The display evokes a private library where visitors will find:
- William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Won, the lost sequel to Love’s Labour’s Lost, of which no known copies survive
- Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, which vanished when his wife’s suitcase was stolen from a train at the Gare de Lyon, Paris, in 1922, never to be recovered
- the Necronomicon, a magical textbook sealed in a Wells Fargo strongbox as a precaution
“An encounter with an imaginary book brings us forcibly to a liminal moment,” said Byers, “confronted with an object that we know does not exist, but then it leaves us suspended in this strange space, for being magical, the book is not to be touched. It appears before us only to amuse, to prompt a gasp, a knowing chuckle, or the briefest thought of ‘O, how I wish!’. Every book in the world was an imaginary book when it was first begun to be written.”
On view are a wide range of lost books that we know once existed but of which no examples now survive. Some were intentionally destroyed, such as Lord Byron’s memoirs which he said detailed “the evils, moral and physical, of true dissipation.” The manuscript was burned by his publisher in 1824. Other works lost to history but shown here are such risqué tales as Sir Richard Burton’s translation of The Scented Garden which was burned at his death by his wife Isabel who thought it was obscene and would damage his reputation.
The first volume of Aristotle’s Poetics, which focuses on Tragedy and Epic, is the earliest surviving work on dramatic theory. The exhibition will offer visitors the second volume, On Comedy, which was lost in the late Middle Ages when the last surviving copy was burned in an Italian monastery in 1327. Other tragic losses include philosopher Pierre Abélard’s Poèmes pour Héloïse and the beautifully bound Poems of Sappho.
There will also be unfinished books, which were begun in some fashion, but were never completed or brought to publication, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. Waking inspired from an opium-induced reverie, Coleridge claimed he rushed to write down his great poem, but only captured 54 lines before he was interrupted by a visitor. When he returned to the work, his vision had evaporated, and the book on view imagines what might have been if he had been able to continue.
Sylvia Plath’s semi-autobiographical novel Double Exposure (1962) was at the centre of a fraught battle. After her death, Plath’s husband Ted Hughes and her mother fought over the manuscript, and it mysteriously vanished around 1970. The cover features a double portrait of Plath’s young heroine with one image seemingly blown away by the wind. In a lighter vein, Raymond Chandler jokingly threatened to write Shakespeare in Baby Talk under the pseudonym of Aaron Klopstein. It includes two of Shakespeare’s plays written in baby talk and an enlightening essay on As Ums Wikes It.
Fictive books exist only in story and never had any physical form of existence whatsoever. Two such books on view, featuring striking purple covers, are The Songs of the Jabberwock, first mentioned in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, with mirror-image writing; and the dark farce The Lady Who Loved Lightning by Clare Quilty, first mentioned by Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.
Magical books include The History and Practice of English Magic by Jonathan Strange and The Necronomicon, the most notorious of the Levantine grimoires (or magical textbooks), which has been kept sealed in a Wells Fargo strongbox since the Crickle accident in 1968. Mentioned in many works by H.P. Lovecraft, legend claims that its use results in a horrible death at the claws of invisible monsters. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, displayed on a tablet using a massive interstellar infrastructure, is a guidebook for the entire universe and the most useful book ever written, even when it is wildly inaccurate.
A catalogue titled Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books will be available from Oak Knoll Press. The Grolier Club will host related free public programs, and a panel discussion during Bibliography Week on January 22, 2025.
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