There’s a Library of Dreams at the Grolier Club

What if I told you that The Code of the Bene Gesserit—in which the matriarchal order on Wallach IX has inscribed the secrets of controlling the mind, the body and thus the universe—can be found, bound in burlap, on the second floor of a 1916 clubhouse on New York’s Upper East Side? What if I told you that, in the same room as this legendary tome, you can behold the script of The Mousetrap, the play Hamlet used to “catch the conscience of the king,” and, on a Nook tablet, the actual Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? What if I told you that these works are part of a traveling show from Paris’ Fortsas Club, named for a count whose library consisted entirely of books of which there was only one in the world? What if only some of this were true?

To tease truth from fiction would be churlish when writing about “Imaginary Books,” an exhibition that opened last month at The Grolier Club—which is itself named for Jean Grolier, a Renaissance bibliophile who commissioned the ornate, color-coded binding of his own vast collection, though I will pull back the curtain just enough to reveal that the man behind it is club member Reid Byers, who is definitely a real person. (I asked for ID.) Byers, who wrote a book on the architecture of private libraries, took his inspiration from the made-up titles on the book spines that adorn jib doors: library passageways used by servants in English country houses that are cloaked by fake bookshelves (as in the “Put the candle back!” scene in Young Frankenstein). He commissioned a small team of what he calls “book-hunters”—with not-coincidental day jobs as bookbinders, letterpress printers and calligraphers—to track down over 100 books that have been said not to exist. It has taken them fifteen years.

These books fall into three categories: lost books, like Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Won, the sequel to Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Hemingway’s first novel, left by his first wife on a train; unfinished books, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan and Sylvia Plath’s Double Exposure; and books that exist only in other books, like the backwards-printed Songs of the Jabberwock (making a rare appearance on this side of the looking-glass) and, on loan from Miskatonic University, the Necronomicon of Abdul al-Hazred, a Levantine grimoire so dangerous it has been locked in a Wells Fargo strongbox.

Seeing these confections in the club’s Rare Book Room, with its grandmotherly furniture and presumably unused fireplace, is much like visiting the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, where ontological mind games are cloaked in a veneer of authenticity. Here are Lord Byron’s dissipated memoirs, long thought destroyed by the author’s deathbed order, exquisitely bound with Byron’s seal. There’s the autobiography of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, almost 350 years in the making, stuffed with mementos of a life well lived. An actual author and a fictitious one, and yet their books are presented as equally real.

And here are books dreamed up by Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, Tom Stoppard and that progenitor of postmodern bibliophilia, Jorge Luis Borges. It’s not just that the Don Quixote written by Borges’ fictional Pierre Menard is here, word-for-word Cervantes’ original, and yet not a copy—although you’ll have to take Byers’ word for it, since this book, like all of them, cannot be opened. It’s that the whole exhibit could have been conceived by Borges.

A couple of volumes come swathed in glassine wrappers; occasionally, there’s a price scrawled at the top-right corner. Some are not the original imaginary book but, perhaps even more imaginatively, an imaginary reprint, like the 2019 edition of Emmanuel Goldstein’s Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism from 1984. Some are accessorized: a booklet entitled Astrology Applied to Horse-Racing (mentioned in George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air) is exhibited with winning pari-mutuel tickets. Most miraculous is a set of stamps obtained at the auction of the estate of Pierce Inverarity, a precious portion of Thomas Pynchon’s Lot 49.

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Among the most convincing replicas are a Samuel French play with a previous owner’s name scribbled in pencil, a faded-just-so City Lights Pocket Poets paperback and two literary magazines: Volume 1, No. 1 of The Stylus, edited by Edgar Allan Poe and an issue of The Strand Magazine with a red belly band trumpeting Dr. Watson’s chronicle of Sherlock Holmes’ case of “The Giant Rat of Sumatra.” That first issue of The Stylus never came out because its editor died, and while The Strand existed, Watson did not. And yet here these magazines are, astonishing simulacra. Even the belly band—surely a later promotional innovation—seems right.

The spell breaks somewhat with the 20th-century editions, their fonts anachronistic, their blocky layouts reminiscent of the early days of QuarkXPress. Dissatisfied with the show’s rendering of Youngblood Hawke’s 1948 Pulitzer Prize-winning Chain of Command (from Herman Wouk’s eponymous novel), I thought of the book jackets designed by Teddy Blanks for the author modeled on Philip Roth in Alex Ross Perry’s 2014 film Listen Up Philip, and imagined Hawke’s name rendered in that bold, swashy typography for, let’s say, a thirtieth-anniversary edition.

How would a graphic designer like Elaine Lustig Cohen have handled a mid-century reissue of karl marx’s comic novella Scorpion and Felix? What would have come of letting Chip Kidd loose on that 2019 Goldstein? I longed to see a foil-spined Little Golden Book, its cardboard corners frayed with teething marks; a mid-‘80s Vintage Contemporary roman à clef meant to be devoured over cigarettes and goat cheese at The Odeon; Kilgore Trout’s The Barring-Gaffner of Bagnialto in a cheesy Pocket Books edition.

But such is the magical hold of this little exhibition: like a book you can’t put down, you start imagining its sequel. After the show leaves The Grolier Club, it will travel to The Book Club of California in San Francisco and the University of Southern Maine in Portland and then presumably, it will return to Club Fortsas, never to be seen again. Now’s your chance.

“Imaginary Books” is on view at The Grolier Club (47 East 60th Street) through February 15, 2025.