Books, lost or imaginary, come to life at Grolier Club

NEW YORK - At Grolier Club on the Upper East Side is an object never before displayed in public - an edition of one of American author Ernest Hemingway's first novels, which was stolen when his first wife left a bag unattended on a train in 1922.

NEW YORK - At Grolier Club on the Upper East Side is an object never before displayed in public: an edition of one of American author Ernest Hemingway's first novels, which was stolen when his first wife left a bag unattended on a train in 1922.

The manuscript was never recovered, and the novel lost to history. But there is a twist. The copy at the Grolier Club is itself a kind of fiction, part of an exhibition called Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, And Fictive Works Found Only In Other Books, curated by Reid Byers, a Maine-based collector and writer.

The original manuscript of Hemingway's book has not, alas, been rediscovered. Byers has created a simulacrum of sorts, an imagined version of One Must First Endure.

This, along with physical representations of more than 100 books that have been lost, unfinished, or dreamed up by other writers, will be on display at the Grolier Club through Feb 15.

Byers started thinking about imaginary books 15 years ago, when he was having a jib door - a door disguised as part of a wall of bookshelves - made for his private library. "I started making a list of fake books and imaginary books," he said.