If I could tell you that The Bene Gesserit Code-where the matriarchal order in Wallach IX wrote the secrets to control the mind, body and thus the universe-could be found, wrapped 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 famous tome, you can see the inscription of mousetrap, a play used by Hamlet to “catch the king’s conscience,” and, on Nook’s tablet, a real one The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? What if I told you that these works are part of a traveling exhibition from Paris’ Fortsas Club, named after the number whose library contained every single book in the world? What if some of this was true?
Teasing truth from fiction can be cruel when you’re writing about “Imaginary Books,” an exhibit that opened last month at The Grolier Club — itself named after Jean Grolier, the Renaissance novelist who commissioned the colorful bindings of his volumes. collection, although I’ll pull back the curtain just enough to reveal that the man behind it is band member Reid Byers, who is a real person. (I asked for ID.) Byers, who wrote a book about the construction of private libraries, took his inspiration from the spines of books that decorate jib doors: library corridors used by servants in English country houses in uniform. with fake bookshelves (as in the scene “Bring back the candle!” Young Frankenstein). He sent a small team of what he called “book hunters”—who had the odd job of book binders, letterpress printers, and calligraphers—to find more than 100 books that were said to be missing. It took them fifteen years.
These books fall into three categories: lost books, such as Shakespeare’s Labors of Love Won, sequence of A Labor of Love Lost, and Hemingway’s first novel, left by his first wife on the train; unfinished books, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan and Sylvia Plath Double Exposure; and books found only in other books, such as those printed on the back Jabberwock songs (making it appear unusual on this side of the looking glass) and, on loan from Miskatonic University, The Necronomicon by Abdul al-Hazred, a Levantine grimoire too dangerous to be locked away in a Wells Fargo safe.
Seeing these loaves in the Book Club Room, with its grandmother’s furniture and fireplace that may not have been used, is like visiting the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, where ontological mind games are overshadowed by the reality of reality. Here are the fading memories of Lord Byron, a long thought destroyed by the author’s deathbed command, neatly bound with Byron’s seal. There is a biography of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, almost 350 years in the making, full of reminders of a life well lived. A real and fictional author, yet their books are presented as equally real.
And here are the books dreamed up by Margaret Atwood, AS Byatt, Tom Stoppard and that patriarch of postmodern bibliophilia, Jorge Luis Borges. That’s not all Don Quixote written by the fictional Borges Pierre Menard is here, the name and voice of the original Cervantes, but not a copy – although you will have to take the name of Byers, since this book, like all of them, cannot be opened. . It is because the whole show could have been conceived by Borges.
A few volumes come wrapped in glass wrap; occasionally, there is a price tag in the upper right corner. Some are not original works of fiction but, perhaps even intellectually, imaginative prints, such as Emmanuel Goldstein’s 2019 edition. Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism from 1984. Others accessed: booklet titled Astrology Applies to Horse Racing (mentioned in George Orwell’s book Coming in the Air) indicated by winning pari-mutuel tickets. Most remarkable is the set of stamps found at the auction of Pierce Inverarity’s estate, a valuable part of Lot 49 of Thomas Pynchon.
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Among the most convincing examples is a Samuel French play with the previous owner’s name written in pencil, a faded City Lights Pocket Poets paperback and two text magazines: Volume 1, No. 1 Stylus, edited by Edgar Allan Poe and the issue of The Strand Magazine with a red belly band that sings the history of Dr. Watson in the case of Sherlock Holmes “The Giant Rat of Sumatra.” That first version of The Stylus it didn’t come out because its editor died, and when The Strand he is, Watson is not. Yet here these magazines are, a wonderful simulacra. Even the belly band—surely a recent advertising innovation—seems okay.
Spelling is a departure from 20th century systems, their fonts anachronistic, their blocky layouts reminiscent of the early days of QuarkXPress. Not satisfied with the program offered by Youngblood Hawke’s 1948 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Chain of Command (from Herman Wouk’s eponymous novel), I thought of the book jackets designed by Teddy Blanks for the author portrayed by Philip Roth in Alex Ross Perry’s 2014 film. Listen Philip, and imagine Hawke’s name rendered in that bold, bold typography, say, the thirties version.
How would a graphic designer like Elaine Lustig Cohen handle a mid-century version of a Karl Marx comic novel Scorpion and Felix? What would have come of letting Chip Kidd go for that 2019 Goldstein? I longed to see the Little Golden Book in foil, its cardboard corners full of teething marks; mid-’80s Vintage Contemporary roman in clef it was to be eaten with cigars and goat’s cheese at The Odeon; Kilgore Trout’s Barring-Gaffner of Bagnialto in the cheesy Pocket Books edition.
But it’s the magic of this little show’s amazing grip: like a book you can’t put down, you start imagining its sequel. After the play leaves the Grolier Club, he will visit The Book Club of California in San Francisco and the University of Southern Maine in Portland and perhaps, he will return to the Club Fortsas, never to be seen again. Now is your turn.
“Psychology Books” is on view at The Grolier Club (47 East 60th Street) through February 15, 2025.
