What do all of the following titles have in common...?
- The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism
- Histoire Abrégée de la Poésie Anglaise
- Only a Factory Girl
- The Murderer's Vade Mecum
- Conversations with Maud'Dib
- Suggestions for the Amelioration of Sick Bays
All of the above titles are imaginary. The titles were invented by real authors to serve the fictional purposes of real books. The invented authors for the above six titles were:
To find out what real book by what real author featured the above fictional titles/authors, simply click on the fictional authors above.
Wikipedia, which lists a surprising number of imaginary books and authors, notes that such books often
1) provide the basis of [a] novel's plot, (2) add verisimilitude by supplying plausible background, or (3) act as a common thread in a series of books or the works of a particular writer or canon of work. A fictional book may also (4) be used as a conceit to illustrate a story within a story, or (5) be essentially a joke title, thus helping to establish the humorous or satirical tone of [a] work....
Quite a few real authors have been especially fond of creating fictional authors for the above and other purposes. Jorge Louis Borges, A. S. Byatt, Jasper Fforde, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut...the list is quite lengthy. So much so that Brian Quinette created a web site called The Invisible Library to try and keep track of such pseudo-titles/authors. The site is no longer active (the previous link is to an archived copy of the site). A successor, though, is active: The Invisible Library, Malibu Lake Branch. (Other, less inclusive, branches also have since cropped up.)
The greatest challenge for most book collectors, of course, is that virtually no pseudo-books have been printed in a real-world analog. (The poem at the center of Nabokov's Pale Fire is the rare exception.) To collect these pseudo-books and pseudo-authors, you are going to need to collect the real books in which they appear....
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