Imaginary Books Exhibition Opening Reception + Lecture

A cross between a book exhibition and a conceptual art installation, Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books consists of a collection of books that do not really exist. Curated by bibliophile Reid Byers, the exhibition includes approximately 100 books and associated objects from his collection—all simulacra, created with a team of printers, bookbinders, artists, and calligraphers—of lost books that have no surviving example, unwritten books that were planned but left unfinished, and fictive works that exist only in fiction.

Highlights of the exhibition include William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Won, the lost sequel to Love’s Labour’s Lost; Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, stolen in his wife’s valise at the Gare de Lyon in 1922 and never recovered; and the Necronomicon, John Dee’s copy of the most notorious of the Middle Eastern grimoires, a book that has been kept sealed in a Wells Fargo strongbox, as a precaution, since the Krickle accident of 1967. A color catalog of some 330 pages accompanies the exhibition, published by Oak Knoll Press in cooperation with the Club Fortsas, the great French book collectors’ society (itself imaginary as well).