Inside A Collection Of 'imaginary' Books

On a snowy Sunday afternoon at the Center for Book Arts in Manhattan, Reid Byers is sitting in front of a group of students who have gathered for a very particular kind of book-making class.

Surrounded by the sturdy-looking tools of bookbinding—giant sheets of paper, a pegboard of hammers, a row of heavy book presses lining the windowsill—it’s easy to feel grounded in the materiality of the medium. But on the projector screen, a slide reads, “Collecting the imaginary.”

Making up imaginary books is “a lightweight hobby,” Byers explains to the class, one you could do entirely in your head: you could dream up fictional book titles in a dentist’s waiting room, he suggests, or while you’re on jury duty.

Imaginary book collecting has a long and rich literary history—especially when it comes to humor. The writer Rabelais invented fake book titles that were bawdy send-ups of the French establishment in the early 16th century. In the 18th and 19th centuries, servants’ passages in wealthy households were often hidden by “jib doors,” bookshelves built directly into walls, and some of the more humorous-minded would put fake titles on the fake books. Charles Dickens had a whole range of books with joke titles bound for this purpose, ranging from Hansard’s Guide to Refreshing Sleep to Lady Godiva on the Horse.

But Byers’s own imaginary book collection goes far beyond making up titles. Some 30 blocks uptown from the Center for Book Arts, his creations have been on display over the past few weeks at the Grolier Club, in an exhibition entitled “Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books.” And today, he is teaching students how exactly he made an entire collection of books that never existed.

The Grolier Club has been a hub of American book-collecting for nearly a century and a half—though admittedly, most of the books its members have collected and displayed over the years have been real. Byers himself is a Grolier member: the convener of its New England chapter. A longtime bibliophile with a diverse resume—“a Presbyterian minister, a C language programmer, and a Master IT Architect with IBM”—he’s also the president of the New England book society the Baxter Club. In 2021, he published The Private Library: The History of the Architecture and Furnishing of the Domestic Bookroom.

Like his fellow Grolier members, Byers shares a deep interest in books as physical objects. In his most recent book, a wonderful—and fittingly dry—companion to the collection of the same name, he opens with a quote from English humorist Max Beerbohm, about the imaginary titles he’d concocted. “I crave—it may be a foolish whim, but I do crave—ocular evidence for my belief that those books were written and were published,” wrote Beerbohm. “I want to see them all ranged along goodly shelves.”

Sitting beside the goodly shelves on the second floor of the Grolier Club, Byers’s own imaginary books feel very real—and unreal. “The dimensionality and the weight of the books gives them a touch of unreality that is different from a list of imaginary books,” Byers tells me. “It makes both the illusion and the desire increase.” Readers of swashbuckling nautical novels might recognize the copy of Stephen Maturin’s Thoughts on the Prevention of Diseases Most Usual Among Seamen. On the far side of the room is a purple-covered copy of The Songs of the Jabberwock—one of the first things Alice encounters when she goes through the looking-glass, its title printed backwards, just like the book she sees.

In his book, Byers talks about reading C. S. Lewis’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader as a child, and watching Lucy Pevensie encounter the Magic Book. “I remember a physical ache of longing for that imaginary book,” he writes, “a painful desire that I still occasionally encounter, though seldom with the force of that first experience.” Making physical versions of pretend books, many made with perfectly chosen and sometimes startlingly convincing details, heightens that desire: you can look, but you can’t read. For the most part, the pages of the books are blank. “There’s a pain in not being able to actually open them,” Byers tells me.

Byers’s collection is wholly devoted to books mentioned in other (real) books. He’s divided them into three categories: the lost, the unfinished, and the fictive. Among the lost are Byron’s memoirs, burned on his orders by his publisher, and Hemingway’s first novel, stolen from a train carriage a century later. The unfinished include the “abandoned,” the “conjectural,” even the “threatened”: Sylvia Plath’s “mysteriously vanished” semi-autobiographical novel Double Exposure, or Raymond Chandler’s Shakespeare in Baby Talk. “Of particular interest,” the exhibition card notes, “is the essay on As Ums Wikes It.”

And then there are the “fictive”: books that are “real” in fictional worlds, one metatextual layer on top of another. While the other categories will delight devotees of literary history, the fictive touches a particularly fannish place, like seeing an exquisitely realized cosplay of a character that previously only existed on the page. There’s an entire cabinet of the in-universe novels of Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane; across the room, an all-black volume cloaked in shadow is the memoirs of Death in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. The catalogue listing notes: “Death’s Memories are bound in a deep Agatean winter’s night.”

That tongue-in-cheek seriousness is an integral part of the exhibition. It’s a list of joke book titles made beautifully three-dimensional—and Byers loves sitting in the room, watching visitors get the joke in real time. “They start going around, and at some point they start to laugh,” he says. “That’s how I know I got them—and they get it.”

He cites artist Antoinette LaFarge as inspiration. Her book Sting in the Tale: Art, Hoax, and Provocation chronicles “fictive art,”which Byers describes as “art that is faked to call into question the art world, and art itself.” Creating fictive art is a delicate procedure. “The point of reveal is the fulcrum on which this kind of art operates,” Byers tells me. “You don’t want to do the reveal too soon, or it doesn’t build the tension—and then there’s no big release. But you don’t want to wait too long because it just pisses people off when they think they’ve been fooled intentionally. So you want to make the reader, as it were, get it soon enough that they feel they’re part of it.”

Back at the Center for Book Arts, Byers instructs the class in this element of performance. He breaks down the collection-creation process into three tasks: the literary, the artistic, and the theatrical. The literary task is conception: writing titles and their backstories, even mimicking real catalogue listings. The artistic part is, in his words, “the fun task”: there’s a wide range of methods he used to physically create these objects. (While he made many of the books himself, often via very affordable means, some were built or finished by skilled artisans.)

But it’s in the theatrical that the world encounters these books—and hopefully gets the joke. Each individual book is a delight, but the presentation of them all in the gallery—replete with Byers’s own wry persona as “curator”—are what truly sell the concept.

Fictive art, Byers tells the class, helps “raise awareness in the observer that not everything they read is real.” It’s a particularly timely reminder, as fake AI-generated book titles spread across the web, and creep onto real citation lists across disciplines.

There is, of course, an astronomical distance between those randomly generated hallucinations and Byers’s whimsical—and intentionally fake—collection of books. The exhibition is a testament to centuries of human imagination, as well as the power that lies in the liminal space between our imaginations and reality.