With the advent of a great novel comes a new and irrevocable universe its author has forged. Even the most minuscule detail imagined–a street name, a painting, a work of fiction–becomes, for a number of pages, a reality. Fiction writers Levi Stahl and Ed Park, fascinated by the imagined novels they kept stumbling upon within their favorite works of literature, created the Invisible Library in order to catalogue these fictitious novels within novels.
Roberto Bolaño, for example, features the novel The Endless Rose in his masterpiece 2666, yet the novel was never really written nor was the author, Archimboldi, a real person except within the confines of Bolaño’s imagined universe.
Inspired by Stahl and Park’s project, the Tenderpixel Gallary in London held an exhibition in June and July called The Invisible Library which took titles from the blog and transformed them into actual works. Sponsored by Ink Illustration, the exhibit was interactive. Viewers were invited to write opening and closing passages to the works based on titles and illustrations, and their musings culminated in the creation of six hands-sewn books. Titles included imagined works from the likes of Bolaño, Vladamir Nobokov, Caitlen Macy, and others. To read more about the exhibit, see Alex Dimitrov’s article about the event in Poets and Writers Magazine.
