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Libraries of imaginary books delight us because they allow us the pleasure of creation without the effort of research and writing. But they are also doubly disturbing—first because they cannot be collected, and secondly because they cannot be read. These promising treasures must remain closed to all readers. Every one of them can claim the title Kipling gives to the never- to-be-written tale of the young bank clerk Charlie Mears, "The Finest Story in the World."317 And yet thehunt for such imaginary books, though necessarily fruitless, remains compelling. What devotee of horror stories has not dreamt of coming upon a copy of the Necronomicon,318 the demonic manual invented by H.P. Lovecraft in his dark Cthulhu saga? According to Lovecraft, the Al A^if (to give it its original title) was written by Abdul Alhazred c. 730 in Damascus. In 950 it was translated into Greek under the title Necronomicon by Theodorus Philetas, but the sole copy was burnt by the Patriarch Michael in 1050. In 1228 Olaus translated the original (now lost) into Latin.319 A copy of the Latin work is supposedly kept in the library of Miskatonic University in Arkham, "one well known for certain forbidden manuscripts and books gradually accumulated over a period of centuries and begun in colonial times." Other than the Necronomicon, these forbidden works include "the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, the Comte d'Erlette's Cultes des Goules, Ludvig Prinn's De Vermiis Mysteriis, the R'lyeh Text, the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan, the Dhol Chants, the Liber Ivoris, the Celaeno Fragments, and many other, similar texts, some of which exist only in fragmentary form, scattered over the globe."320
Not all imaginary libraries contain imaginary books. The library that the barber and the priest condemn to the flames in the first part of Don Quixote; Mr. Casaubon's scholarly library in George Eliot's Middlemarch; Des Esseintes's languorous library in Huysmans' A rebours; the murderous monastic library in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose ... all these are merely wishful. Given money enough and time, such dream libraries could find a solid reality. The library that Captain Nemo shows
Professor Aronnax in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (with the exception of two books by Aronnax himself, of which only one is given a title, Les grands fonds sous-marins) is one that any wealthy French literary gentleman of the mid-nineteenth century might have acquired. "Here are," says Captain Nemo, "the major works of the ancient and modern masters, that is to say, all the most beautiful creations of humanity in the realms of history, poetry, fiction and science, from Homer to Victor Hugo, from Xenophon to Michelet, from Rabelais to Madame Sand."321 All real books.
Like their brethren of solid wood and paper, not all imaginary libraries are composed only of books. Captain Nemo's treasure trove is enriched by two further collections, one of paintings and one of "curiosities," according to the custom of European scholars of his time. The duke's wilderness library in As You Like It, made up of "tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in every thing,"322 requires no volumes of paper and ink. Pinocchio, in the nineteenth chapter of Collodi's novel, tries to imagine what he might do if he had a hundred thousand coins and were a wealthy gentleman, and wishes for a beautiful palace with a library "crammed full with candied fruit, cakes, panettoni, almond biscuits and wafers stuffed with
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cream."323
The distinction between libraries that have no material existence, and those with books and papers that we can hold in our hand, is sometimes strangely blurred. There exist real libraries with solid volumes that seem imaginary, because they are born from what Coleridge famously called the voluntary suspension of disbelief.
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Captain Nemo's library, an illustration from the first edition of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
Among them stands the Father Christmas Library in the Provincial Archives of Oulu, Northern Finland, whose other, more conventional holdings go back to the sixteenth century. Since 1950 the Finnish Post's "Santa Claus Postal Service" has been in charge of replying to about six hundred thousand letters received yearly from more than one hundred and eighty countries. Until 1996 the letters were destroyed after being answered, but since 1998 an agreement between the Finnish Postal Services and the provincial authorities has allowed the Oulu Archives to select and preserve a number of the letters received every December, mainly, but not exclusively, from children. Oulu was chosen because, according to Finnish tradition, Father Christmas lives on Korvantunturi, or Ear Mountain, located in that district.324 Other libraries deserve to be imaginary for more whimsical reasons—such as the Doulos Evangelical Library, housed in the oldest-serving ocean liner, which tours the world with a cargo of half a million books and a staff of three hundred people; and the minuscule library of Geneytouse, in southwestern France, perhaps the smallest library in the world, lodged in a hut of nine square metres, without water, heating or electricity, founded by Etienne Dumont Saint-Priest, a local farmer passionate about literature and music, who had long dreamt of offering his village a place to read and exchange books.
But not all our libraries come from dreams; some belong to the realm of nightmares. In the spring of 1945, a group of American soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division discovered, hidden in a salt mine near Berchtesgaden, the remains of the library of Adolf Hitler, "haphazardly stashed in schnapps crates with the Reich Chancellery address on them."325 Of the grotesque collection, only twelve hundred, bearing either the Fuhrer's bookplate or his name, were deemed worth preserving in the Library of Congress in Washington, on the third floor of the Jefferson Building. According to the journalist Timothy W. Ryback, these spoils of war have been curiously overlooked by historians of the Third Reich. Hitler's original library has been estimated at sixteen thousand volumes, of which about seven thousand were on military history, over a thousand were essays on the arts, almost a thousand were works of popular fiction, several more were tracts of Christian spirituality and a few were pornographic stories. Only a handful of classic novels were included: Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe, Uncle Tom's Cabin and Don Quixote, as well as most of the adventure stories by Hitler's favourite author, Karl May. Among the volumes
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Hitler's personal bookplate.
kept in the Library of Congress are a French vegetarian cookbook inscribed by its author, Maia Charpentier, to Monsieur Hitler, vegetarien, and a 1932 treatise on chemical warfare explaining the uses of prussic acid, later commercialized as Zyklon B. It is difficult to think of constructing, with any hideous accuracy, a portrait of this library's owner. Let there be libraries that the imagination condemns simply because of the reputation of their reader.