Right off the bat, it’s clear that Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books was assembled by a bunch of absolute nerds — and that’s a compliment of the highest order. Curated by Reid Byers, who recently wrote a 500-page tome about the private library, and exhibited at the Grolier Club, one of North America’s oldest bibliographic societies — i.e., literary types of the most sincere kind — it may be the only exhibition I’ve seen wherein I’ll tolerate descriptors like “sublunary,” “thaumaturgical,” and “arealia,” all of which are included in the show materials.
“Sublunary,” as I found out, means “relating to the world or life on earth, especially in contrast to the spiritual world.” Created by a team of artists, printers, bookbinders, and calligraphers, these books don’t belong to the real world, at least not in the traditional sense. They can be “lost” or “unfinished,” both of which apply to Sylvia Plath’s Double Exposure (1964/2024?), a semi-autobiographical novel about a wife with an awful husband, the manuscript of which was possibly destroyed by her awful real-life husband, Ted Hughes. The existence of this book here, with its cover of a doubled Plath beneath a serifed title and published by the actual Heinemann company, suggests an alternate and more kind reality in which Plath did not die by suicide, and her manuscript had not vanished.
Or they are books that never existed at all, except in the worlds conjured in other works of fiction, such as “The Garden of Forking Paths,” mentioned in a Jorge Luis Borges collection fittingly entitled Fictions (1944). We critics often talk about the “worldbuilding” potential of artworks. But this collection of “books,” taken together as a work of art (a “post-structuralist conceptual art installation,” as the exhibition calls it) might bring this idea closest to reality, as it draws upon the literary labor of dozens of the greatest minds in history to build — if only for a brief moment in this space — an intricate mirage of possibilities.
Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books continues at the Grolier Club (47 East 60th Street, Midtown, Manhattan) through February 15. The exhibition was curated by Reid Byers.
