IMAGINARY BOOKS AND LIBRARIES


Surely the strangest gimmick that has ever turned up in the extensive history of bibliography is the imaginary book or library. An imaginary book or library is a spurious or fictitious or supposititious one which exists only in the imagination of its inventor. The discovery half a millennium ago of the art of printing by means of movable type seems to have provided the background necessary for this deviation from that sober fidelity to truth which is the almost invariable foundation for all work in bibliography.
It is fair to say that on the record no group of scholars has been more selflessly industrious, or more earnestly devoted to the commonweal of letters, than the bibliographers in their modestly undramatic way. The dissemination of accurate knowledge about books is the cornerstone of the bibliographer's credo.

In dealing with the imaginary book or library, we literally cut across the grain in the field of bibliography. There is little sympathy there, in general, for free-wheeling imagination, for, whatever their sins otherwise, the vast majority of bibliographers are conscientiously devoted to unerring accuracy. To pretend that a book exists when it doesn't looks to the careful researcher like a doubtful joke, at best. The inner spirit of the calling is of itself compulsive of truthfulness. Imagination good or bad, the slightest deviation from the objective fact - the open, plain, obvious fact subject to checking by just anybody - is what the bibliographer strains to the utmost to supply in his zeal to serve other lovers of the book and so promote their enjoyment of books by providing easy, direct access to them. (To be continued.)


In the meantime, you are invited to take a leisurely stroll in MY COTTAGE GARDEN

Or perhaps you'd like to make a quick visit on the day of THE BIOGRAPHER'S TALE

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THE FORTSAS CASE


Jean Nepomucene Auguste Pichauld, Comte de Fortsas, was a man with a singular passion. He collected books of which only one copy was known to exist. If he ever discovered that one of the volumes in his library had a duplicate anywhere in the world, he would immediately dispose of it. So when he died on September 1, 1839 he possessed only fifty-two books, but each of them was absolutely unique.

His heir, not sharing the old man’s passion for book collecting, arranged for an auction to sell off the library, and so a catalogue of this small but highly unusual collection was mailed to bibliophiles throughout Europe. The auction, the collectors were told, was to be held in the offices of Mâitre Mourlon, notary, 9 rue de l’Église, in Binche, Belgium on August 10, 1840.

When Europe’s librarians and intellectuals received the catalogue, they could scarcely believe their eyes. The books would have been valuable even if duplicate copies had existed, but the fact that each one was unique made them priceless. The catalogue contained detailed descriptions of the books, as well as numerous comments. A typical comment read:

A manuscript note attributes this work to Pere Felix Grebard, private secretary to the noted Huet, bishop of Avranches. This Pere Grebard is likewise the author of a very rare tragedy, ‘La mort de Henry le grand,’ which I have had in my collection, but of which I rid myself, having learned that Mons. J. Ketele of Audenarde had another copy of it.

On August 9, the day before the auction, the collectors descended on Binche like a pack of vultures. The Belgian government even sent an official representative, believing that the collection was so valuable that it should be bought in its entirety and kept in the country. But only disappointment greeted the hopeful buyers. Try as they might, they could not locate any street named “rue de l’Église” in the town of Binche. Their spirits sunk even lower when they read an announcement in the newspaper informing them that the town of Binche had decided to purchase the entire collection for its public library. Disheartened, some of the collectors returned home, but others stayed, curious to view the unique books in their new home. But although they searched and searched, they couldn’t find the library anywhere. Only then did it gradually dawn on them. There was no Binche public library. There was no Comte de Fortsas. The entire auction and list of unique books had been an enormous, elaborately designed hoax.

The man behind the hoax was a local antiquarian named Renier Hubert Ghislain Chalon (1802-1889). The planning that had gone into the deception was incredible. He had carefully researched the interests of all the major bibliophiles in Europe in order to ensure that they would make the long and fruitless trek to Binche. And he had done all this merely for the sake of a practical joke.

The hoax proved not to be a total loss for its victims. The catalogue they had received became a highly coveted collector’s item as did the (pirated) second edition.

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THOMAS J. WISE


The most heavily researched and thoroughly documented case of literary forgery in history centers around the series of pamphlets forged by Thomas James Wise and his collaborator Harry Buxton Forman. The Wise forgeries have been the focus of numerous books, countless articles and papers, entire symposia, and dozens of exhibitions.

Since the publication of John Carter's and Graham Pollard's An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets (1934), the Wise forgeries and the persons and events surrounding them have been subjected to continuous analysis, discussion, and debate which should continue unabated for years to come.

The Wise forgeries have also served as the collecting focus of hundreds of bibliophiles, beginning, of course, with those collectors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who unwittingly assembled the first major collections of the pamphlets of Thomas J. Wise and Harry B. Forman.

THE WISE FORGERIES


Since the publication of the original Carter-Pollard Enquiry, more than one hundred of the Wise-Forman forgeries and piracies have been identified. Carter and Pollard identified two basic categories for the forgeries which Wise and Forman produced: counterfeit or "binary editions," which were simply fabrications of earlier editions; and "creative" forgeries which purported to be original imprints which preceded previously-known editions of an author's work.

As Carter and Pollard pointed out in the Enquiry, this sort of creative forgery was previously unknown. Wise and Forman, both together and sometimes independently, would take a piece by a well-known author which had appeared previously in a periodical or other collection, and issue it in a pamphlet printing with an imprint date which preceded any known separate printing. Since there were no originals against which these creative forgeries could be compared - the usual means of detecting a forgery - Carter and Pollard developed new techniques to identify these forgeries.

Carter and Pollard compared the texts with later printings and sometimes found that the suspicious texts followed demonstrably later versions. They scoured auction records to determine when the suspect pamphlets first appeared for sale. In addition, they would search for presentation copies of the suspected forgeries or glean through authors' correspondence for references to these alleged publications; seldom did they find any such examples which suggested the publications were actually authentic. Finally, they analyzed the chemical composition of the papers and the history of the types used in the suspected pamphlets. They were able to demonstrate convincingly that many of the pamphlets could not have appeared at the time of their alleged imprint dates because either the paper or the type was not yet in existence.

At the time of his death in 1995, Frank Tober had acquired nearly half of the more than one hundred known Wise-Forman forgeries and piracies. In addition, he focused his collecting on other books which Wise or Forman had either written or edited and acquired one hundred sixty individual titles.

FURTHER READING


[IMAGINARY BOOKS] Rabelais, F (ed.) G Brunet. Catalogue de la Bibliotheque de l'Abbaye de Saint-Victor au seizieme siecle... suivi d'un essai sur les Bibliotheques Imaginaires...

Paris, J Techener, 1862. 8vo., orig. publisher's printed wrappers. First Edition. Uncommon. A very good copy with some wear to the backstrip. A scholarly account and reprint of the imaginary library catalogue that Rabelais included in 7th chapter of Bk. II of Pantagruel. The text is accompanied by an extensive essay on imaginary libraries and books by G Brunet.

Price: USD 300.00. Order no. 784.

See: The Invisible Library / The Interstitial Library / The Best Books Never Written

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