In December 1922, Ernest Hemingway’s wife made a terrible mistake.
At the time, the great novelist and short story writer was a 23-year-old young reporter working in Switzerland. Like the story goesHis then-wife, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson, was traveling from Paris to Switzerland to join her husband for Christmas, and she decided to take his drafts and manuscripts with her – all packed into one suitcase. Just before her train departed, Hadley left her luggage to buy water. When she returned, the suitcase containing all of Hemingway’s fiction was gone.
But what if that wasn’t the case?
At a new exhibition in New York you can see Hemingway’s first novel, if it had not been stolen from his wife. You can also see William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Wonthe sequel lost Unpleasant The labor of love is lost that has baffled scholars for centuries, and that of Sylvia Plath Double exposureher half-written novel that disappeared around 1970.
The exhibition “Imaginary Books: Lost, unfinished, and fictional works found only in other books”, is now on display at the Grolier Club, an association for book lovers founded in 1884. Official described as ‘part bibliophile entertainment and part conceptual art installation’, the show is a collection of texts that have one thing in common: they do not exist.
“It takes a certain suspension of disbelief to even consider having an exhibition of the imaginary,” says Reid Byers, the creator and curator of “Imaginary Books.” Guardianby Adriaan Horton.
Initially, Byers had a list of about 400 imaginary titles to work with, but he narrowed it down to the 114 now on display. For the installation, the curator collaborated with bookbinders, calligraphers, printers and artists, in which the books are displayed as works of art. If Artnet‘ Richard Whiddington writes: ‘Visitors are asked to judge works entirely by their covers.’ The so-called stories are left to the imagination.
The books on display are divided into three categories: Lost books are texts that once existed but somehow became misplaced, such as those by Hemingway and Shakespeare. The unfinished books also include parts that have been left behind or destroyed, such as Plath’s Double exposure or the memoirs of Lord Byron, which were burned by his friends and lovers in what the greatest crime in literary history.
Then there are the books that are fictional and only appear in other books. Visitors will find the driver’s manual listed in The haunted toll booth; The hitchhiker’s guide to the Milky Way from the novel of the same name; the book of the Bene Gesserit Dune; The songs of the Jabberwockthat Alice encounters in Wonderland; and a copy of Nymphs and their mannerswhich Lucy sees on Mr. Tumnus’ shelf The lion, the witch and the wardrobe.
“These books are liminal objects,” says Byers New York Times‘Sophie Haigney. “They put you on the threshold right before you go down the rabbit hole.”
“Imaginary Books: Lost, unfinished, and fictional works found only in other books‘ is on view through February 15, 2025 at the Grolier Club in New York City.
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