At the Grolier Club on the Upper East Side is an object never before displayed in public: an edition of one of Hemingway’s first novels, which was stolen when his first wife left a bag unattended on a train in 1922. The manuscript was never recovered, and the novel lost to history.
But there is a twist: The copy at the Grolier Club is itself a kind of fiction, part of an exhibition called “Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books,” curated by Reid Byers, a Maine-based collector and writer. The original manuscript of Hemingway’s book has not, alas, been rediscovered — Byers has created a simulacrum of sorts, an imagined version of “One Must First Endure.” This, along with physical representations of more than 100 books that have been lost, unfinished or dreamed up by other writers, will be on display at the Grolier Club, from Thursday through Feb. 15.
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. “I started making a list of fake books and imaginary books,” Byers said. Soon, he decided he wouldn’t be satisfied with just a list: He wanted to find a way to display these books. Working with a team that included two bookbinders, a letterpress printer, a calligrapher and a magician, he commissioned and put together this library, sometimes using parts of existing books as the basis and sometimes starting from scratch. He worked on some books solo.
“These books are liminal objects,” Byers said. “They put you on the threshold just before you go down the rabbit hole.” (There is, for good measure, a version of the book Alice read in “Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.” With a cover dyed purple, its title, given by Byers, is “The Songs of the Jabberwock” and it’s printed as a mirror image.)
“When the books arrived, our executive director joked, ‘These books are surprisingly heavy for being imaginary,’” Shira Belén Buchsbaum, exhibitions manager at the Grolier Club, recalled. “I said, ‘They’re all portals into other universes, so there’s a strong gravitational weight to them.”
The books are not really meant to be opened and read; the text inside doesn’t generally correspond to the lost or fictional objects. “I like to tell people that if you open one of these books, it will protect itself by turning immediately into something else,” Byers said, slyly.
The reasons that books go missing or never get finished animate the exhibition’s witty wall text. Christopher Marlowe’s unpublished play “The Maiden’s Holiday” resurfaced more than 100 years after his death, but a cook had been using its pages to line pie tins and start fires. Nothing survived. After Lord Byron died in 1824, a group of friends burned his memoirs — which the poet had not wanted published in his lifetime because of possible scandals — in a fireplace at his publisher’s office. The wall text tells us, “This biblioclasm was called ‘the greatest literary crime in history.’”
Meanwhile, the tactile imaginary books — those dreamed up by authors in their own books — provide delightful new lenses into familiar works. Buchsbaum noted that there’s really “something in the show for everyone, and so many pathways across genre and time.” We get to see the cover of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” from the novel of the same name, displayed on a tablet, and a copy of “The Fairy Melusine,” which appears at the center of A.S. Byatt’s novel “Possession.” There is even an artifact drawn from “Lolita” — an imagined version of Humbert Humbert’s scholarly book.
Stories abound, and the objects can be playful. Wall text imagines that an edition of a mystery novel that appears in Dorothy Sayers’s “Strong Poison” is “bound in poison: the green is arsenic and the red cyanide.” In the exhibition, this brightly splotched volume appears in mannequin hands wearing surgical gloves.
After its time in New York, “Imaginary Books” will travel to the Book Club of California in San Francisco. Eventually, it will return to its permanent home, which the exhibition lists as Le Club Fortsas in Paris. The only thing? Le Club Fortsas doesn’t actually exist. The address, in the 10th Arrondissement, leads to the facade of an old house that serves to cover an air vent for the French railway system. Fitting, for an imaginary collection.
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