The Fortsas Club announces a fascinating exhibit:
Livres Imaginaires, Reid Byers’ exhibition of Imaginary Books, is a collection of volumes that live only in other books: lost, unwritten, or fictitious books that have no physical existence. Its exhibition at the Fortsas Club has been extended until the end of 2024, when it will move to the Grolier Club in New York. In April of that year, the collection will be exhibited at the Book Club of California in San Francisco.
The difficulties associated with exhibiting a non-existent collection cannot easily be overstated. In addition to the purely ontological considerations involved, the mechanics of presenting to the public a series of objects that cannot possibly be on show present a broad spectrum of curatorial challenges, only some of which have been completely overcome.
There are three kinds of imaginary books. Lost books once really existed but have now disappeared completely. […] Unwritten Books are books that authors tried unsuccessfully to write […] Fictional Books are books that appear only in stories. […]
And sealed forever in a Wells Fargo strong box is John Dee’s copy of the Necronomicon (HPL 5), on permanent loan from the library of Miskatonic University.
See the link for examples and some enticing images, and see Sophie Haigney’s NYT story (archived) for more background; if you reach the end of the latter, you will be rewarded with some perhaps significant information about the Club Fortsas. And there are more links at the MetaFilter post that hipped me to this happening.
It is no disrespect to the Fortsas Club (which I failed to stop by when I was last in Paris) to note that is much less accessible to me than the Grolier Club, which is 17 miles from my house (driving – less as the crow flies), so I will try to make a note to check out the exhibition upon its arrival there.
By all means report back if you do so.
Actually, I spoke too soon. Per the Grolier Club’s website the exhibition there actually opened two days ago, and is up until Feb. 15 of the soon-arriving new year. If this doesn’t show you the exhibit directly, click on Second Floor Gallery after if necessary getting to Current from Exhibitions.
https://www.grolierclub.org/Default.aspx?p=DynamicModule&pageid=384827&ssid=322448&vnf=1
I will see if I can check it out in the coming weeks.
Thank you JWB, the Grolier site seems to have images of the whole collection, from Rabelais through Sterne up to The Hitchhiker’s Guide. My nostrils are twitching already with the must of a bookstore.
Please do report back.
if you reach the end of the latter, you will be rewarded with some perhaps significant information about the Club Fortsas
Presumably an hommage to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortsas_hoax
(as indeed the reference to “the Comte” in the announcement itself makes clear …)
In the remote past there was a Web site called The Invisible Library that listed many books that appeared only in stories—I feel sure it was over a thousand. Now there’s a blog called The Invisible Library with the same kind of thing but considerably smaller, last updated in 2008. Before the original Infixible (typos left in) Library went up in flames, its contents were saved to a Wikipedia article, which people including me added to. That’s gone now too, and there’s just a short article called “Fictional Book”. (I’d have called it “Fictitious Book”.) Sic transit.
Perusing the club website led me to discover that “tasse de vin” is an eggcorn for “tastevin” and not vice versa.
Before the original Infixible (typos left in) Library went up in flames, its contents were saved to a Wikipedia article, which people including me added to. That’s gone now too
Are there no archived versions of any of this?
From a description of the fellow who owns the artifacts in this exhibition, found elsewhere on the internet: “Reid Byers is a longtime celebrant of the private library. He has been a Presbyterian minister, a C language programmer, and a Master IT Architect with IBM.”
Fictional book is right there; note the lowercase b.
Thanks for the correction, but that’s the short article, not the huge “List of Fictional Books”. However, here’s the catalog of what I think is the Internet Archive’s latest version of The original Invisible Library.
https://web.archive.org/web/20060423143252/http://www.invisiblelibrary.com/ILCatalogf.htm
Thanks!
“Please note: The catalogue used to list entries by pseudo-author and pseudo-title. These have been removed to save space and because they weren’t visited very often. However, if you want them back, please let me know. The Oddities section was removed because it’s redundant.”
Ah, I thought it sounded familiar — it turned up at LH back in 2005.
And the Wikipedia page https://web.archive.org/web/20200206002659/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_books
Thanks for the suggestion. It was good to see that again.
And thank you, mollymooly! It hadn’t occurred to me that anyone would have taken on the job of archiving Wikipedia, including deleted articles.
There’s even more in the talk page.
Among real books that sound like fictional ones, there’s Wesley McColgan’s How to Knurl.
The Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year is still going. Ally Louks’ “Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose” is probably ineligible as an unpublished PhD thesis but was trending on Xitter last week.
April of that year
This text shows signs of poor editing: “that year” is 2025, which is to say, next year. I didn’t think I’d missed it. At the end, it’s clearer: 4/1/25-6/25/25.
celebrant of the private library
For that he has a book, too. Which was one of those Zoom things virtually out here, because of the pandemic, in 2021.
Piled Higher and Deeper topic: Foxing in the Unseen Library collection.
Foxing in the Unseen Library collection
That would surprise me, in that foxing is an indication of poor quality paper. But the items in the collection were never printed.
Would Casaubon’s Key to All Mythologies qualify for this collection? As it’s both imaginary and unfinished, perhaps not.
Casaubon’s book is in the original Invisible Library, along with Stories of Great Men, taken from Plutarch by Mary Garth, and Cultivation of Green Crops and the Economy of Cattle Feeding by Fred Vincy. Nothing from Eliot is in the Wikipedia article, showing that I was wrong to think the Wikipedia article had everything the Invisible Library had.
Also, jhe Invisible Library is the only place I could find that showed the complete Fortsas catalog.
And I spent way too much time this morning at the Grolier site, looking at photos and descriptions of almost all the books.
As the hoary joke goes, a German, an Englishman and a Jew each write a book about elephants. The German writes a three-volume Introduction to Elephant Theory; the Englishman writes a medium-sized Hunting the Elephant in Darkest Africa; the Jew writes a pamphlet, The Elephant and the Jewish Question.
I have not seen a copy of any of the three.
The corresponding African work is a helpful manual entitled (in the appropriate local language) Protecting Your Crops from Harmful Pests.
https://ukcdr.org.uk/case-study/elephants-and-local-farms/
(This proposal seems actually to work, even though it’s a bit like something out of a fable.)
[Kusaal wabʋg “elephant” belongs to a noun-class pairing (“gender”) which is pejorative when used for animals (and people.) This surprised me initially; but then I’ve never been a subsistence farmer in Africa.]
The Russian edition of the hoary joke seems to have been the origin of the memetic phrase Россия – родина слонов (literally “Russia is the homeland of elephants”).
Or, to quote Russian Wikipedia circa December 2002: “Россия – родина слонов (ушастых, повышенной проходимости – см. мамонт)” [“Russia is the homeland of elephants (big-eared, all-terrain – see: mammoth)”].
EDIT:
(This proposal seems actually to work, even though it’s a bit like something out of a fable.)
“‘It’ll never do to go down among them without a good long branch to brush them away—and what fun it’ll be when they ask me how I like my walk. I shall say—“Oh, I like it well enough—”’ (here came the favourite little toss of the head), ‘“only it was so dusty and hot, and the elephants did tease so!”’”
[I’m not sure to what extent brushing them away with a long branch would have worked against actual African elephants, but “dusty and hot” sounds like an appropriate enough description of West Africa. Most of Africa, really, except the really jungly bits and some of the mountains.]
Likewise, הפיל והבעיה היהודית ‘the elephant and the Jewish Problem’ is a meme in Modern Hebrew.
dusty and hot
Not dusty when it’s raining, even in the savanna (I once got completely soaked to the skin in walking less than ten yards from my car to the house door. Proper rain, not the pathetic European kind.)
And in West Africa, not always so hot, when it’s dusty – the famous Harmattan season. I recall my son. aged about six, wrapping himself in a blanket and complaining of the cold one December evening when the temperature dropped to a bracing 18 centigrade. Up farther toward the desert, it can get really cold at night.
Russia is the homeland of elephants
I still haven’t got over the discovery that camels come from America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracamelus
I’d love to have look at Ganesh Ramsumair’s Profitable Evacuation. Was it really that scandalous, even for 1940s Trinidad?
It isn’t in the Wikipedia list.
I still haven’t got over the discovery that camels come from America.
TIL that scientists managed to get enough classificationally-usable proteins (not DNA but collagen) out of a three-million-year-old fossil bone fragment from Ellesmere Island to confirm attribution to camels.
(That particular fossil fragment was suspected to be probably camelid on other grounds, which is why it was tested in the first place.)
I experienced proper rain in Provence some 20 years ago; and with the changing climate there’ve been a few episodes even here in Berlin.
Yes, collagen is the Next Big Thing except it isn’t big so far. It keeps far better than DNA.
There’s was a great nature documentary, The Elephants of Tsavo, that featured Kenyan farmers explaining how they drove elephants off their fields. When the elephants wandered by and pooped, their collected the dung. The next time the animals came around, the farmers woukd by sett fire to dried hunks of dung and throw it back at the elephants.
Delayed shittification.
Elephant dung! Is there anything it can’t do?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Ofili
The French editions of this monograph are variously known as “L”elephant et le sexe” and “Sexe avec les elephants.”.
Hey, welcome back, JC!
Hi, John!
John!! What a pleasure and relief. Welcome back!
welcome back, JC!! it’s good to see (read?) you.
Much relief and celebration! Put out the bunting!
Welcome back!
Calloo! Callay!
🥳
[Silent joy]
Elephant dung! Is there anything it can’t do?
Now that it brought John back, I don’t think so.
Thread won.
Now in the Grauniad.
Embarrassing:
Reminds me of the English teacher at my high school who thought George Eliot was a man.
But of course the Graun is used to printing corrections.
It is also possible that Clare Quilty existed but was, in fact, female. Humbert is, after all, at some pains to obfuscate the actual sex of “Lolita”, though he leaves numerous clues for the discerning reader.
I made it to the Grolier Club yesterday afternoon to see the exhibition in person. Recommended. Not a huge time commitment because even with >100 objects how long can you look at a given fake book (that can’t be opened and browsed through)? The accompanying wall-label text for the various objects is sometimes independently amusing; the label for _The Lady Who Loved Lightning_ does mention the additional wrinkle that the fictitious author of the fictitious book may not actually exist even within the imagined world of the fictitious work mentioning her.
As I said, recommended. Would be willing to take another spin through the exhibition if any Hattics are going to be in Manhattan between now and mid-February with that intention and would like to coordinate.
If Manhattan is inconveniently located for you, they suggested a list of “Implicated Institutions” you might want to visit instead, with very interesting (if imaginary) collections of their own, viz. Le Club Fortsas (as mentioned in the original post here), plus the Orne Library @ Miskatonic U., the New Library of Shrewsbury College, Oxford, the “Special Collections” section of the library of Pelby College, Cambridge, and of course the Johnny Chung Library of Plainfield Teachers’ College in New Jersey.
Thanks for that report!
Oddly, I’d never heard the theory about Clare Quilty being imaginary. I’ll have to think about that.
Thanks, J.W. I’d already had some fun looking up Pelby College and Plainfield Teachers College—which I remembered faintly from Mad, but the much fainter bell turned out to be from Strange But True Football Stories.
My third-grade teacher had The Giant Book of Strange but True Sports Stories, which also covered Plainfield Teachers College. Mad, of course, had 43-Man Squamish.