Fictional book
Fictional books are imaginary books, ie books that do not exist in reality. They "exist" but inasmuch as in real books, reference is made to them.
A well-known example is the story "Investigation of the Work of Herbert Quain " of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, in 1944 in the anthology fictions ( Ficciones ) was published. The narrative describes in the form of a critical essay incurred between 1933 and 1939 imaginary works of Herbert Quain, a non-existent author. The same applies to the reviews " Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote " and " The Way to Almotasim ", which also appeared in the fictions.
In his foreword to the fictions of Borges explained ironically why he has opted for a kind of anthology: "A tedious and strapazierender It is nonsense to write thick books; auszuwalzen to five hundred pages an idea whose perfectly adequate explanation takes a few minutes. Better yet, we should proceed so that you do, as if there were these books already, and a résumé, a comment is submitted. (...) For greater shrewdness, greater lack of talent, greater laziness I have chosen to write notes on imaginary books. "
Another typical example is A Perfect Vacuum (also the absolute vacuum) of the Polish author Stanislaw Lem. This anthology contains 16 reviews; 15 of which refer to non-existent books. The first review refers to the anthology itself, then, is the only one that refers to a real book. The author of the review - it is natural Lem himself - refers to the following introduction: " to write reviews about non-existent books is not Lem's invention; not only in a contemporary writer - JL Borges - one finds such attempts [ ... ] "This has presented an imaginary Lower Sorbian contemporary literature in the second part of his Encheiridion Vandalicum in 2012, for example, Jürgen Buchmann, quoted and discussed in detail at six reviews. .
Fictional libraries or Pseudobibliografien are another way to refer to fictional books. The first examples can be found in Rabelais ' Gargantua and Pantagruel, where the author invents an entire monastery library, as well as Johann species that the Catalogus Catalogorum perpetual motion durabilis or allowed to appear in 1590 Perpetual catalog of catalogs, a work that comprehensive exclusively of 526 items imaginary bibliography consists. Outbid it is by Hartwig Rademacher, whose published in 2003 Acute literature consists of about 1000 invented title information.