A whimsical new exhibition assembles a range of books that don’t exist, from Byron’s destroyed memoirs to Shakespeare’s lost play
At a small, unassuming exhibit in midtown Manhattan, you can see the lost translation of Homer’s single comic epic, judge the art design on Sylvia Plath’s unpublished manuscript Double Exposure – squabbled over by her mother and husband Ted Hughes, it supposedly disappeared in 1970 – or examine the one remaining copy of Aristotle’s Poetics II: On Comedy, the influential treatise on theater thought to have burned at a Benedictine Abbey in 1327 (at least, according to Umberto Eco’s 1980 novel The Name of the Rose). The extremely rare collection of books, on display at the Grolier Club until 15 February, spans texts from ancient Greece to 20,000 years in the future, when the Book of the Bene Gesserit populated the libraries of Dune. The one commonality? None of them exist.
Or, rather, they exist only in the realm of the imaginary. The poems of Sappho, Dylan Thomas’s abandoned manuscript Llareggub, the nested books from Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night, a Traveler – all are lost to time or limited to fiction. That they are seen in our world at all is thanks to Reid Byers, the creator and curator of the Imaginary Books collection, who imagined what these books might look like, should we be able to perceive them. “It takes a certain suspension of disbelief to even consider having an exhibition of the imaginary,” said Byers, a multi-hyphenate bibliophile who has also worked as a Presbyterian minister, a welder and a C language programmer, on a recent tour of the exhibition.
