Gallery of Lost and Imaginary Books

December 6, 2024 7:41 AM

The Lost Book Exhibition. "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. [Items include The Giant Rat of Sumatra, The Murder of Gonzago, and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as well as Marlowe's Maiden Holiday whose pages were used by a cook to line pie tins and start fires] Its exhibition at the Fortsas Club has been extended until the end of 2024, when it will move to the Grolier Club in New York....After the exhibition, the books will return to a famed museum in Paris at 145 La Fayette St.

Background.

posted by storybored (14 comments total)

If you want to know more about the Fortsas Club, be sure to read to the end of the Background article. You're in for a surprise.
posted by ALeaflikeStructure at 8:03 AM on December 6, 2024 [2 favorites]

I imagine the exhibition catalogue is unavailable.
posted by Phanx at 8:08 AM on December 6, 2024 [1 favorite]

The Great Fortsas book auction.
posted by Phanx at 8:15 AM on December 6, 2024 [4 favorites]

Imaginary Books, by Reid Byers.
posted by Phanx at 8:21 AM on December 6, 2024 [1 favorite]

The untitled science fiction novel given as a birthday present to the narrator of Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden.

Three weeks after Mother died I began to reread the book Sue had given me for my birthday. I was surprised how much I had missed. I never noticed how particular Commander Hunt was about keeping the ship clean and tidy, especially on the really long journeys through space. Each day, the old earth day, he climbed down a stainless steel ladder and inspected the messroom. Cigarette ends, plastic cutlery, old magazines, coffee cups and spilled coffee hung untidily about the room. “Now that we do not have gravity to keep things in their place,” Commander Hunt told the computer technicians who were new to space travel, “we must make an extra effort to be neat.” And during the long hours when there were no urgent decisions to be taken, Commander Hunt passed the time “reading and rereading the masterpieces of world literature, and writing down his thoughts in a massive steel-bound journal while Cosmo, his faithful hound, dozed at his feet.” Commander Hunt’s space ship sped across the universe at one-hundredth the speed of light in search of the source of energy that had transformed the spores into a monster. I wondered if he would have cared about the state of the messroom, or about world literature, if the ship had remained perfectly still, fixed in outer space.

posted by Lemkin at 9:22 AM on December 6, 2024 [1 favorite]

One of my favorite imaginary books is The Book of Sand, from the Borges story of the same name. I wonder if it's in this exhibition.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 9:49 AM on December 6, 2024 [1 favorite]

I was listening to an old paywalled episode of Otherworld (with your host Jack Wagner), where they were discussing how not just ideas, but beings and objects can exist outside of time, and that they can be willed into existence. They used the example of the Necronomicon. One could argue that the Necronomicon exists, has always existed, and will forever exist. Lovecraft exposed the idea of the Necronomicon and since then it has manifested itself into a physical object which is used in ritualistic exercises, which themselves have actual, physical repercussions. (A similar argument is that flying machines have existed as long as humankind itself, but it took the collective will of untold numbers of people and years to develop the science, mathematics, technology and infrastructure needed to produce actual, physical airplanes. But this is a thread about books, not airplanes.) Anyways, I was bringing this up because I love the idea of a physical, bound edition of a fictitious book, and how imaginary it is really?
posted by slogger at 10:34 AM on December 6, 2024

love this, thanks for posting
reminds me of The Invisible Library
posted by chavenet at 11:53 AM on December 6, 2024

Iʻd imagine Finnegans Wake would be a gold mine, if only I could read the book.
posted by Droll Lord at 12:16 PM on December 6, 2024

I always thought The Secret Goldfish by D.B. Caulfield (as mentioned in Catcher in the Rye) would be a fun read.
posted by SisterHavana at 2:29 PM on December 6, 2024

The complete set of A First Encyclopaedia of Tlön, all volumes, or GTFO.
posted by signal at 2:32 PM on December 6, 2024

Unless it’s cheating to use a movie, for me, nothing would top Prospero’s Books.

A Book of Water
A Book of Mirrors
A Book of Mythologies
A Primer of the Small Stars
An Atlas Belonging to Orpheus
A Harsh Book of Geometry
The Book of Colours
The Vesalius Anatomy of Birth
An Alphabetical Inventory of the Dead
A Book of Travellers' Tales
The Book of the Earth
A Book of Architecture and Other Music
The Ninety-Two Conceits of the Minotaur
The Book of Languages
End-plants
A Book of Love
A Bestiary of Past, Present and Future Animals
The Book of Utopias
The Book of Universal Cosmography
Lore of Ruins
The Autobiographies of Pasiphae and Semiramis
A Book of Motion
The Book of Games
Thirty-Six Plays
posted by Lemkin at 2:43 PM on December 6, 2024 [2 favorites]

Mod note: [Thank you for this lovely biblioteca perdida, storybored! We've added it to the sidebar and Best Of blog roundup of recent great posts!]
posted by taz (staff) at 2:05 AM on December 8, 2024

The full online exhibition is up at Grolier.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 8:00 AM on December 8, 2024