‘These are magic books’: bringing imaginary works of literature to life

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In a humble exhibit in midtown Manhattan, you can view the purported lost translation of Homer's single comic epic, pass judgement on the design of Sylvia Plath's unpublished manuscript Double Exposure - disputed between her mother and husband Ted Hughes, supposedly lost in 1970 - or study the sole remaining copy of Aristotle's Poetics II: On Comedy, the influential theatrical treatise believed to have been destroyed in a Benedictine Abbey fire in 1327 (at least, as depicted in Umberto Eco's 1980 novel The Name of the Rose). The extremely rare collection of books, on display at the Grolier Club until 15 February, comprises texts from ancient Greece to 20,000 years in the future, in the Book of the Bene Gesserit in Dune. The one thing they all have in common? None of them actually exist.

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Actually, they exist only in the realm of the imagination. The poems of Sappho, Dylan Thomas’s abandoned manuscript Llareggub, the nested books from Italo Calvino’s If on a winter's night, a traveller – all are lost to time or confined to fiction. That we see them at all is thanks to Reid Byers, the creator and curator of the Imaginary Books collection, who imagined what these books might look like, should we be able to perceive them. “It takes a certain suspension of disbelief to even consider having an exhibition of the imaginary,” said Byers, a well-known bibliophile with various skills, including those of a minister, a welder and a programmer in C language, on a recent tour of the exhibition.

Put it on hold, and you can enjoy the biggest and most real collection of make-believe stories - the rarest type of books - so far. Many have tried to collect them, often making a list. Occasionally, they have decorated a secret door - a servants’ door that blends into the wall and is disguised by fake books with funny titles (for example, 'The Scottish Boccaccio' by D Cameron). But Byers’s collection goes further - as if "if you opened that secret door and stepped into a hidden room", he said. "If you looked at it and if the circumstances are right, you can see all the way to Wonderland."

The exhibition starts with what could have been - the imaginative, the speculative, and things that might have been easier to picture. For instance, what would Hemingway's first novel have looked like if it hadn't been stolen from his wife Hadley at the Gare de Lyon back in 1924? Or, what if Shakespeare's Love's Labours Won had survived the year 1610? Understandably, lost books are different from unfinished ones, which can be divided into various categories. These include destroyed (like Byron's memoir, which his wife had the misfortune of burning in what many consider a massive crime against literature); orphaned; abandoned; thought out; conjectural; and proposed texts (like Raymond Chandler's bizarre plan to write Shakespeare in baby talk, which Byers imagined as a children's book with a disturbing image of a baby Shakespeare on the cover).

A warning at the exhibition says: "The process of showing the public a range of objects that can't possibly be on display poses a wide variety of challenges for the curators, many of which have yet to be fully overcome." These challenges are particularly complicated for the largest category of non-existent books: fictional works, which exist only within other books. This includes driver's manuals such as Rules & Traffic Regulations That May Not Be Bent or Broken, a handbook mentioned in Norman Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth, which looks similar to a 1960s travel guide. Or The Songs of the Jabberwock, bound in purple and printed in reverse, "pretty much as Alice found it sitting right inside the mirror", said Byers. A copy of Nymphs and Their Ways, seen by Lucy on Mr Tumnus's bookshelf in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, enhanced with a Romantic-era painting of women bathing. And a maroon-coloured version of The Lady Who Loved Lighting by Clare Quilty, who was murdered by Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita – though, as Humbert Humbert is a notoriously unreliable narrator, we don't really know if he even existed. It's a unique item in the collection – "a book written by a character who doesn't exist, even in the book where they first appear. So it's doubly imaginary," Byers explained.

Imaginary Books takes its creative flair to its most elaborate and whimsical extremes. Byers, an enthusiast with a particular interest in private libraries and hidden treasures, started off with a list of approximately 400 imaginary book titles, roughly half of which were historical and the other half fictional. "It's impossible to compile a comprehensive list of fictional books without devouring a vast amount of literary works," he noted, acknowledging the impossibility of the task. Byers eventually shortened the list to 114 titles on display. "When deciding whether to feature a book, we consider whether I or our team can conceptualise what it should look like," he explained. Another complicating factor is visualising beforehand. This is manageable in the case of a lost work attributed to the Roman historian Suetonius, but considerably more challenging with books such as The Octarine Fairy Book, a text that supposedly radiates the magic – only visible to wizards and feline creatures – as described in Terry Pratchett's novel. The replica produced for the exhibition is a shimmering, iridescent blue and gold that defies any formal description and will appear to be many colours at once.

Byers conceived around half of the collection, collaborating with ideas and craftsmanship from letterpress artist Martha Kearsley, calligrapher Margo Dittmer, and historical bookbinding expert Jeff Altepeter – "they all catch on," said Byers. When it comes to what's actually inside the books – arranged and stylized in the style of a genuine rare book collection, complete with fake provenance and classifications – it depends who you ask. Byers answers first in character: "These are magical books. They exist only in the cabinet due to a carefully balanced ontological equilibrium. Technically, there are mystical reasons why they can't be opened. If you were to open one, it would safeguard itself by transforming into something else." Alternatively, he added, roughly half of the books are empty on the inside, and the rest contain some other written material within their covers.

Imaginary Books is, as Byers will admit, a genuine and earnest hoax, down to its listed "sponsorship" by the Mountweazel Foundation in Faraway Hills, New York. (A mountweazel, naturally, being a term for a false item in a reference work, usually created to prevent copyright theft.) But that doesn’t make this collection of 114 works – well, 113, as Juan Villoro’s self-explanatory The Wild Book has slipped through – no less authentic. "It feels real in a distinct way," said Byers. "And that’s why some of them may give you a little shiver at the back of your neck. It’s the feeling of 'oh, how I wish I could experience that'."

• 'Imaginary Books' is currently on show at the Grolier Club in New York City until 15 February 2025