None of These Books Exist. An Inventive New Exhibition Asks: What If They Did?

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 cub reporter working in Switzerland. As the story goes, his then-wife, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson, was set to travel from Paris to Switzerland to join her husband for Christmas, and she decided to bring his drafts and manuscripts with her—all of them, packed into one suitcase. Just before her train left, Hadley abandoned her luggage briefly to buy water. When she returned, the suitcase containing all of Hemingway’s fiction was gone.

But what if it wasn’t?

At a new New York exhibition, you can gaze upon Hemingway’s would-be first novel, had it not been stolen from his wife. You can also see William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Won, the lost sequel to Love’s Labour's Lost that has mystified scholars for centuries, and Sylvia Plath’s Double Exposure, her half-written novel that disappeared around 1970.

The exhibition, “Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books,” is now on view at the Grolier Club, a society for book lovers founded in 1884. Officially described as “part bibliophilic entertainment and part conceptual art installation,” the show is a collection of texts that have one thing in common: They don’t exist.

“It takes a certain suspension of disbelief to even consider having an exhibition of the imaginary,” Reid Byers, the creator and curator of “Imaginary Books” tells the Guardian’s Adrian 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. The curator worked with bookbinders, calligraphers, printers and artists for the installation, which displays the books like works of art. As Artnet’s Richard Whiddington writes, “Visitors are asked to judge works entirely by their covers.” The would-be stories are left to the imagination.

The books on display are classified into three categories: Lost books are texts that once existed but were somehow misplaced, such as Hemingway’s and Shakespeare’s. Unfinished books include volumes that were abandoned or destroyed, like Plath’s Double Exposure or Lord Byron’s memoirs, which were burned by his friends and loved ones in what has been called the greatest crime in literary history.

Then there are the books that are fictive, existing only within other books. Visitors will find the driver’s handbook mentioned in The Phantom Tollbooth; The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy from the novel of the same name; the book of the Bene Gesserit from Dune; The Songs of the Jabberwock, which Alice encounters in Wonderland; and a copy of Nymphs and Their Ways, which Lucy spots on Mr. Tumnus’ shelf in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

“These books are liminal objects,” Byers tells the New York Times’ Sophie Haigney. “They put you on the threshold just before you go down the rabbit hole.”

“Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books” is on view at the Grolier Club in New York City through February 15, 2025.

Ella Feldman | READ MORE

Ella Malena Feldman is a writer and editor based in Washington, D.C. She examines art, culture and gender in her work, which has appeared in Washington City Paper, DCist and the Austin American-Statesman.