The Best Fake Books—Made Real

Many books exist, but many more don’t. Why does a book come about? There’s ego, politics, the human condition, man’s yearning for understanding. Books fail to exist for the same reasons. Authors destroy books because of ego. Emperors destroy them because of politics. Books get lost because of misunderstandings: Hemingway’s partially completed first novel vanished after he asked his wife to meet him in Lausanne with the manuscript. She assumed that he wanted the carbon copies, too, and threw everything in a suitcase, which got stolen from a train. Unwritten books also result from the human condition, specifically from its tendency toward inertia: no one ever got around to writing them. Sometimes books go extinct because of the short shelf life of papyrus.

For fifteen years, Reid Byers, a former systems designer at I.B.M., has been collecting books that don’t exist. Byers used to amuse himself by coming up with fake books to put on fake shelves that disguised a hidden door in his home library. (This pastime is not as unusual as you might think; Dickens’s library contained “On the Horse,” by Lady Godiva, and “Cats’ Lives (Vol IX).”) Byers explained, “The first one I picked was Aristotle’s Poetics—Volume II,” which dealt with comedy, and once actually existed. He made a book cover as an homage, or a parody. “I thought it was really funny,” he said. “I just couldn’t stop.”

Byers’s collection, comprising a hundred and fourteen (fake) books, is currently on display at the Grolier Club, in midtown, along with an accompanying (real) book, written by Byers. Both are called “Imaginary Books.” It’s an impressive collection—Sappho, Shakespeare, Woolf, Poe, Le Guin. Byers was in town, from Portland, Maine. He sat in an armchair in the club’s library, wearing a brown tweed blazer over a green sweater, and offered a tour.

The collection consists of physical copies designed by Byers. “I have what I call the five-second rule,” he said. “They have to fool an expert for five seconds and a civilian indefinitely.” He didn’t invent any books. All formerly existed, were never finished, or were found within other works, such as the play in “Hamlet,” which Byers has in his collection. First stop: Homer’s third epic, the Margites. “It’s about this bonehead who keeps getting in trouble,” Byers said. “He’s Lucille Ball.” Byers’s version had a paper dust jacket, torn at the corners. In a vitrine on the opposite wall was a comedy by Karl Marx (“Not Groucho!”), who is believed to have later burned it. Byers paused in front of another book. “This is one of my favorites: ‘Shakespeare in Baby Talk,’ ” he said—envisioned, but never completed, by Raymond Chandler. “The best play in it is ‘As Ums Wikes It.’ ” In another room was a copy of the play “The Lady Who Loved Lightning,” by Clare Quilty, a dramatist character in the memoirs of Humbert Humbert, which itself makes up most of “Lolita”—a play within a book within a book. “But, because Humbert is an unreliable narrator, Quilty may not exist at all,” Byers said. “And if that is true, then this is, I think, the unique occurrence of an imaginary book written by a character who does not exist even in the book of origin, and so is doubly imaginary.” (In Stanley Kubrick’s “Lolita”—a film of the book about the book that contains the play—Quilty does exist, and is played by Peter Sellers.)

Byers created his fake books by modifying actual ones. He enlisted helpers, including two bookbinders, a letterpresser, and a specialty calligrapher. “Some of it’s just, you know, careful Photoshopping,” he said. To impart a weathered look, he continued, “we just kicked them around on the floor.”

He sourced several old specimens, secondhand, from the library of a nunnery. He used one for “On the Usefulness of Long Codpieces,” from Rabelais’s “Gargantua and Pantagruel.” He also procured a codpiece for display from a maker in California. “That’s her full-time job,” Byers said. “She’d never made a fourteen-inch one before.”

The tour continued: Sylvia Plath’s last novel, unfinished when she died. Byron’s memoirs, burned after his death. What exists of Coleridge’s masterpiece “Kubla Kahn,” which came to him all at once—“He was completely stoned,” Byers said—and was written in a trance that was ruined when someone knocked on his door.

Byers, who is seventy-seven, owns many real books, too. He wrote a book on private libraries. Before that, he spent time as a Presbyterian minister, a choir director, a TV announcer, and a welder. “Everything I’ve done had something to do with books,” he said. “Except welding.” For a while, he lived across the street from Toni Morrison, in Princeton. His memoir, which does not exist, might have described his time with the Navy in Vietnam, where he wrote his first book. “It was about life on a ship,” he said. “It was not a great book.” Which imaginary work does he most want to read? “Sappho,” he said. “Some things just break your heart because they aren’t real.”

Byers’s collection used to include a first edition of “Ghost Book,” by the underground Misty Poets of China. “Now, that’s an interesting book,” Byers said. To avoid censorship, the poets published it using a mimeograph machine and wallpaper paste. “They went out one night and wallpapered Beijing with the book. The first edition was destroyed by the rain or the authorities and doesn’t exist . . . I thought. And then I found that one of the poets had kept a mimeographed copy.” What did Byers do with his own? “I destroyed it,” he said. ♦