The Invisible Library
JA
September 06
The Endless Rose by Archimboldi, The Secret Goldfish by D.B. Caulfield and When the Train Passes by Elisabeth Ducharme are all fictive works of fiction – that is, they are imaginary books that appear within stories (the titles hark from Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Vladimir Nabokov’s Bend Sinister respectively).
Authors Levi Stahl and Ed Park began a blog called the Invisible Library in 2007 to keep track of these various imagined works. ‘The genesis of the library was very simple,’ says Stahl. ‘I happened to read Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Graham Greene's The End of the Affair in quick succession, and was struck by the number of nonexistent novels mentioned, and at times even described in each book.’
The blog has even been the inspiration for a recent exhibition by London’s Tenderpixel Gallary, which created an interactive ‘imagined library’ in collaboration with INK Illustration. INK’s artists designed covers for several fictional texts and authors such as Ian Sinclair and Saci Lloyd, as well as the public were invited to write the opening and closing passages.
Have a look at some images from the exhibition here.
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