To the informal viewer, the books on show within the second-floor gallery of the Grolier Membership in Midtown Manhattan appear like a powerful assortment of uncommon tomes—common fare for the bibliophilic society. There’s a worn Ernest Hemingway, a group of Sappho poems, and an eerie-looking Sylvia Plath cowl. Some bear creator names that maybe sound solely vaguely acquainted: Harriet Vane, Samuel Pickwick, Orlando.
Guests roam the gallery, eyeing the fragile volumes enclosed in glass circumstances. Each couple of minutes, somebody giggles. They get the joke: none of those books is actual.
The exhibition, Imaginary Books: Misplaced, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Discovered Solely in Different Books (till 15 February 2025), is the brainchild of the author and bibliophile Reid Byers. Together with a staff of bookbinders and artists, Byers dropped at life greater than 100 books that he describes as “among the best non-existent works in all of literature”. These embrace works misplaced to historical past, like Lord Byron’s memoirs, which had been famously burned upon his demise, and books that exist solely in fiction, like The Songs of the Jabberwock from Lewis Carroll’s By the Trying Glass and The Hitchhiker’s Information to the Galaxy from the eponymous sequence.
GEORGE GORDON NOEL, LORD BYRON, Byron’s Memoirs. Unpublished manuscript. Burned at John Murray’s store in London on 17 Might 1824.
Byron mentioned that his memoirs introduced “the evils, ethical and bodily, of true dissipation”. The manuscript was burned at his orders by John Murray, his writer, and John Cam Hobhouse within the fire of Murray’s store at Albemarle Avenue. Solely 23 individuals had been permitted to learn it. This biblioclasm has been referred to as “the best literary crime in historical past”. Photograph: Reid Byers
The works might solely be simulacra, however Byers didn’t make them up. “There’s no option to pretend the imaginary,” Shira Buchsbaum, the exhibitions supervisor on the Grolier Membership, tells The Artwork Newspaper. “These books exist in some airplane of being.”
Byers got interested within the concept of imaginary books about 15 years in the past, when he was constructing a jib door in his house library. The hidden doorways, which date again to 18th-century European nation homes, had been initially designed to mix in with partitions in order that servants may come and go unobtrusively. Within the library room, jib doorways had been coated with guide spines and strips of wooden that matched the bookcases. Oftentimes, the household would give you humorous guide titles to write down on the spines. “Once I tried to do this,” Byers says, “I received excited concerning the concept of utilizing books that had been misplaced or didn’t exist.”
Byers started curating an unlimited record of imaginary books that spans genres and historical past. The books match into three classes: misplaced (books with no surviving copy), unfinished (nearly accomplished however by no means printed, or considered however by no means written) and fictive (present solely contained in the realm of a novel).
But it surely was not satisfying to only have false guide spines on his jib door. Byers wished the bodily objects. “That’s the expertise that makes the hair get up on the again of your neck,” he says, so he endeavoured to convey these books into the three-dimensional world.
Set up view of Imaginary Books: Misplaced, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Discovered Solely in Different Books on the Grolier Membership, Manhattan Courtesy the Grolier Membership
After its stint on the Grolier Membership, Byers’s assortment will journey to the E-book Membership of California in San Francisco (17 March-13 July). He additionally chronicles the venture in his very actual guide, Imaginary Books: Misplaced, Unfinished, and Fictive Works, out subsequent month
Although Byers doesn’t contemplate himself an artist, the exhibition is certainly a murals. Analyzing his assortment, patrons encounter The Octarine Fairy E-book, a kids’s guide that seems in Terry Pratchett’s The Color of Magic. It’s sure within the fictional, magical color octarine, “mentioned to be seen solely to wizards and cats”, reads a placard beside the guide.
On one other shelf sits a sickly wanting copy of Demise within the Pot, one of many thriller books penned by Dorothy Sayers’s protagonist Harriet Vane in Sturdy Poison. The guide is wrapped in a green- and red-splotched material—supposedly traces of arsenic and cyanide.
Throughout the room, there’s a non-existent work of nonfiction referred to as Ideas on the Prevention of the Ailments most ordinary amongst Seamen, which is referenced in Patrick O’Brian’s Desolation Island. Byers’s “severely stained” copy has a backbone allegedly fabricated from sailcloth.
“This exhibition may encourage anybody to dive down any variety of rabbit holes,” Buchsbaum says.
Set up view of Imaginary Books: Misplaced, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Discovered Solely in Different Books on the Grolier Membership, Manhattan Courtesy the Grolier Membership
It’s laborious to withstand the urge to interrupt open the gallery circumstances and see what lies inside the books. Doing so, although, would solely reveal clean pages or the textual content of one other guide totally. “The issue with imaginary books like that is they’re magic,” Byers explains with a smile. “When you had been to attempt to pressure one open, it will shield itself by turning into one other guide.”
However the temptation is the purpose. Every guide brings the beholder to a liminal threshold, the area between this world and one other. These moments occur in books on a regular basis, Byers says, like “when Alice notices there’s a rabbit with a weskit, or when Lucy stumbles by way of the wardrobe, or when the monster’s finger twitches as a result of it’s alive”.
In an imaginary library, guests are invited to conjure any variety of parallel universes. What if one may see the color of magic, or step by way of the wanting glass? What if Hemingway’s manuscripts for his first novel had not been stolen on a prepare in France that fateful day in 1922?
“What wouldn’t it imply if we knew what Aristotle thought was humorous?” Byers provides, noting that the Greek thinker’s treatise on comedy was misplaced in antiquity. We might by no means know. “However,” he says, “I’ve a pleasant copy of it.”
- Imaginary Books: Misplaced, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Discovered Solely in Different Books, Grolier Membership, till 15 February 2025
