It's a not really ordinary exhibition which opened at the start of the year in New York, and which opens the mind, wherever you are. Meet at the Grolier Club, in the Manhattan district, where you can find works… that don't exist. A completely fanciful American brought unfinished, stolen or imagined Books to life in films…
It is an object of incredible rarity which is exhibited in a small New York museum. A small book with a rusty orange cover, called First, One Must Endure… (translated as “You must first endure…”). It is an edition of one of the first novels ofErnest Hemingway… Which no one has ever been able to read, since the novel vanished when the American writer's first wife left a bag unattended on a train in 1922.
From Sappho to Aristotle via Byron… the museum of masterpieces that will never be
Lost forever… Until Hemingway’s work appeared here, alongside a thousand others “and if ever…”. A collection of stolen, unfinished, dreamed books… Among them are the ancient poems of Sapphothe legendary treatise on theater signed by Aristotlewhich is supposed to have burned in a Benedictine abbey in 1327, and even the memoirs of Lord Byronburned by his wife (a fact confirmed), an event described by some as the greatest crime in literary history… The collection extends from ancient Greece to 20,000 years in the future, with Le Livre des Bene Gesserit, taken from the book and the film Dune.
“It takes a certain suspension of disbelief to consider an exhibition of the imagination”
The most tangible collection of imaginary books, it is an idea of a certain Reid Byers, bibliophile, former Presbyterian minister, welder, and C programmer. Eccentric and a little (a lot?) lit, he explains: “It takes a certain suspension of disbelief to consider an exhibition of the imagination”. Obviously, this goes without saying. In fact, these books-that-could-have-existed are a real fad for many reading fans.. Lists of these books had been circulating for years, until Reid Byers brought them to life. And it's not just the unfinished ones, since we also find works that only exist in other books, like Jabberwock Songswith a beautiful purple binding, printed on the reverse, “just like Alice (in Wonderland) found it right inside the looking glass”…
A museum that leaves our imagination free
You must therefore be imaginative, as if to succeed in creating The Book of Octarine Fairiesa strange artifact believed to be (literally) the color of magic – only visible to wizards and cats – according to Terry Pratchett's novel. Imaginary Books is, as Reid Byers concedes, a real and sincere joke, from 114 works – well, 113, because The Wild Book of Juan Villoro escaped….
