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

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Manhattan, you can see the lost translation of Homer’s single comic epic, judge the art design on Sylvia Plath’s unpublished manuscript Double Exposure – squabbled over by her mother and husband Ted Hughes, it supposedly disappeared in 1970 – or examine the one remaining copy of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’.”