Imaginary Books

Books found in other books

Camel Ride to the Tomb, 1945 by X Trapnel as mentioned in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, Books Do Furnish a Room (1971) included in Reid Byers’s Imaginary Books

Imaginary books don’t exist in real life. They exist only in other books. There is a fairly extensive literature on imaginary books.

The latest installment is an exhibition of imaginary books (simulacra)

Reid Byers’s Imaginary Books

EXCEPT— from December 5, 2024 – February 15, 2025—the Grolier Club¹ in New York held an exhibition of imaginary books from the collection of Reid Byers. Byers's collection comprises a hundred and fourteen (fake) books, along with an accompanying (real) book, written by Byers, titled Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished and Fictive Books.² The exhibit is now at the Book Club of California until July 21, 2025.

For fifteen years, Reid Byers, a former systems designer at I.B.M., has been collecting books that don't exist. .. —Sappho, Shakespeare, Woolf, Poe, Le Guin. ..The collection consists of physical copies designed by Byers. "I have what I call the five-second rule," he said. "They have to fool an expert for five seconds and a civilian indefinitely." He didn't invent any books. All formerly existed, were never finished, or were found within other works, such as the play in "Hamlet," which Byers has in his collection. ³

Byers created his fake books by modifying actual ones. He enlisted helpers, including two bookbinders, a letter-presser, and a specialty calligrapher. "Some of it's just, you know, careful Photoshopping," he said. To impart a weathered look, he continued, "we just kicked them around on the floor."⁴

Highlights:

• William Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Won, the lost sequel to Love's Labour's Lost;

• Ernest Hemingway's first novel, stolen from his wife's bag on a French train in 1922;

• Necronomicon, John Dee's copy of the eldritch grimoire

• Camel Ride to the Tomb by X Trapnel ⁵

But There’s More

“The Invisible Library” is a collection of books that only appear in other books. Within the library's catalog you will find imaginary books, pseudobiblia, artifictions, fabled tomes, libris phantastica, and all manner of books unwritten, unread, unpublished, and unfound. This was a website by Brian Quinette.⁶

Jonathan Law at the Substack, “The Water Which Feeds the Roots of All Evil” has written:

• Phantom Libraries: From Rabelais to Swift: The seriocomic catalogue of lost, imaginary, or otherwise phantom books

• Phantom Libraries: From Dickens to The Sims

• The Sealed Museum of Sir Thomas Browne: More phantom libraries and literary ectoplasm

• The Unwritten Works of S. T. Coleridge: More Phantom Libraries and literary ectoplasm

• The Dreaming: On dream books, dream libraries and a dream bookshop

• Babel In the concluding part of this series about Phantom Libraries and unwritten books, we come at last to Borges, monkeys and Babel

There is a reddit thread: r/ImaginaryBooks

And a Wikipedia article: Imaginary book

Imaginary Books: The book club of California's live and online exhibition opening and program

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1. The Grolier Club (NYC) is America's oldest and largest society for bibliophiles and enthusiasts in the graphic arts. The Grolier Club was founded January 1884. It is named after Jean Grolier de Servières, Viscount d'Aguisy, Treasurer General of France, whose library was famous. His motto, "Io. Grolierii et amicorum" [of or belonging to Jean Grolier and his friends], suggested his generosity in sharing books.

The Grolier Club's home at 47 East 60th Street

2. Byers, Reid, Grolier Club, and Book Club of California. 2024. Imaginary Books : Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books. First edition. Paris, New Castle, Delaware: Le Club Fortsas ; Oak Knoll Press.

3. Helfand, Zach. 2025. “Invisible Ink.” New Yorker 100 (49): 9–10.

4. Ibid.

5. In addition to Camel Ride to the Tomb, Anthony Powell included over thirty fictional books in his 12 volume- A Dance to the Music of Time. The books of fiction by fictional author, St. John Clarke, include Fields of Amaranth, Match Me Such Marvel, Dust Thou Art, The Heart is Highland, Never to the Philistines, E'en the Longest River, and Mimosa. Other fictional books are Death Head's Swordsman and Profiles in String by the fictional author, X Trapnel and Pistons as Engine Melody by the fictional character, Kenneth Widmerpool. Writing about Powell's fictional books, Robin Bynoe notes that there is a fictional bookcase of these works in the Powell papers. (Bynoe, Robin. 2022. "Furnishing a Meta-Room" The Anthony Powell Society Newsletter 86 (spring):21-24).

6. “Invisible Library” saved at the Internet Archive here: https://web.archive.org/web/20041130030237/http://www.invisiblelibrary.com/ It is described in “The greatest books that never were. Literature is full of imaginary books.” By Laura Miller at Salon in 2011.