Some of these books were lost and never found; others were never even written.
My latest for Atlas Obscura is up! I reported on Reid Byers's truly wonderful "imaginary books" collection on display at the Grolier Club in Manhattan right now—and I got to sit in on his class about how to make an imaginary collection at the Center for Book Arts!
These are physical books that were mentioned in other books, split into three categories: "lost," "unfinished," and "fictive." All three are delightful, but the fictive category has *so* many fandom favorites—Death's memoirs from Discworld, a monograph by Sherlock Holmes, Stephen Maturin’s Thoughts on the Prevention of Diseases Most Usual Among Seamen, an entire case of the in-universe books of Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, and many more.
The collection is on display at Grolier until February 15th and it's free to the public; in March it moves to San Francisco. (You can also look at it online—but seriously, these books are incredible in 3D if you're in the area in the next few weeks.) I think fanbinding folks would be especially interested in the material aspects of this project. (And I suspect some fanbinders will have also created in-universe books from their favorite source material!)
Some of my favorites from the online version of the exhibition:
Kubla Khan by Coleridge (if the man from Porlock hadn’t gone and interrupted him at a crucial moment)
Outside the Town of Malbork—but due to a printing error, this volume contains a different book entirely—Leaning From the Steep Slope. (All of them fictional books found in fragments in If on a winter’s night a traveler)
A concise francophone guide to English poetry by an intellectual gentleman by the name of Humbert Humbert
That famous volume of the Encyclopedia of Tlön discovered and described by Professor Borges.
Hannah Jarvis’s seminal monograph on the hermit of Sidley Park, whom she proves conclusively was the former tutor Septimus Hodge.
The manuscript of The Oak Tree: A Poem, which its author/authoress labored over through four hundred or so years (and multiple genders)
Jonathan Strange’s masterwork, The History and Practice of English Magic.
And finally—and maybe this is the funniest one of all:
A GODDAMN SAMUEL FRENCH ACTING EDITION OF THE KING IN YELLOW
The opening event for the San Francisco exhibition is tomorrow and will also be livestreamed! https://www.bccbooks.org/event/imaginary-books-lost-unfinished-and-fictive-works-found-only-in-other-books/
