Fashion
Books, Lost or Imaginary, Come to Life at the Grolier Club
An exhibition of what-ifs, designed to be seen, not read, will be on display through February.
At the Grolier Club on the Upper East Side is an object never before displayed in public: an edition of one of Hemingway’s first novels, which was stolen when his first wife left a bag unattended on a train in 1922. The manuscript was never recovered, and the novel lost to history.
But there is a twist: The copy at the Grolier Club is itself a kind of fiction, part of an exhibition called “Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books,” curated by Reid Byers, a Maine-based collector and writer.The original manuscript of Hemingway’s book has not, alas, been rediscovered — Byers has created a simulacrum of sorts, an imagined version of “One Must First Endure.”This, along with physical representations of more than 100 books that have been lost, unfinished or dreamed up by other writers, will be on display at the Grolier Club, from Thursday through Feb. 15.
Byers started thinking about imaginary books 15 years ago, when he was having a jib door — a door disguised as part of a wall of bookshelves —made for his private library. “I started making a list of fake books and imaginary books,” Byers said. Soon, he decided he wouldn’t be satisfied with just a list: He wanted to find a way to display these books. Working with a team that included two bookbinders, a letterpress printer, a calligrapher and a magician, he commissioned and put together this library, sometimes using parts of existing books as the basis and sometimes starting from scratch. He worked on some books solo.
“These books are liminal objects,” Byers said. “They put you on the threshold just before you go down the rabbit hole.” (There is, for good measure, a version of the book Alice read in “Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.” With a cover dyed purple, its title, given by Byers, is “The Songs of the Jabberwock” and it’s printed as a mirror image.)
“When the books arrived, our executive director joked, ‘These books are surprisingly heavy for being imaginary,’” Shira Belén Buchsbaum, exhibitions manager at the Grolier Club, recalled. “I said, ‘They’re all portals into other universes, so there’s a strong gravitational weight to them.”