Invisible Books

My favorite character in Kurt Vonnegut's novels has always been Kilgore Trout. I realize this statement shoves me into the same box as the Star Wars fans who proclaim the superiority of the barely-on-screen Boba Fett: that of the snobbish, marginalia-worshipping fanboy. My preference, though, has nothing to do with the fleeting nature of Trout's appearances; it's all about Trout the writer, Trout's body of work as described by his few devoted readers. I especially love the tidy little descriptions of Trout's stories and novels. These are clever plots, the kind that demonstrate Vonnegut's playful sense and quickness of mind, the kind of three-sentence ideas you wish you'd thought of yourself—but only so you might sprinkle them into your cocktail conversations. You'd never actually want to flesh them out. Better to leave these pieces at their most open, at their most alive and pregnant point. Better to leave them as potential literature—just like the books that do not exist inside a wonderful new book that does: The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature, edited by Ben Segal and Erinrose Mager.

When reading the potential literature offered in The Official Catalog—texts in the form of blurbs written for non-existent books—I tended to think less of Kilgore Trout and more of Italo Calvino, particularly his Invisible Cities (1972). The imagined places within are whimsical as those cities, incomplete as the imagination, with strange or missing foundations, invisible buildings and streets. These lost-and-never-been books are sometimes upside down and sometimes underground and sometimes abandoned, and sometimes, they've never been inhabited at all. Like Calvino's structures, these book portraits are poignant in their brevity and their necessarily incomplete nature, and in the endless possibilities that flow from them as a result. The fictional books inside, each written by a different contributor to The Official Catalog, prolong those possibilities for us. We are never disappointed because we are free to travel countless paths, forced to make no choices, asked only to enjoy our total freedom to imagine.

The phrase "potential literature" has clearly been borrowed from the full name of that group of writers and mathematicians who use constraints to create their work: the Oulipo, the Ouvroir de littéra potentielle, or workshop of potential literature. It isn't hard to see why this nod to the Oulipo works in several ways. In The Official Catalog, the potential literature has been created using at least one constraint (write a blurb for a book that does not exist) though obviously in a looser, less formal manner than the Oulipians themselves would practice. And at the same time, the blurb writers are creating their own set of constraints to set the reader off in new imaginings of these books. Imaginary texts fashioned from real texts, all stemming from one simple constraint. It's a playful homage I suspect most Oulipians would very much enjoy.

The writers included in the pages of The Official Catalog do a great deal with one simple constraint. Some contributors, like John Madera with his very funny "Spectral Confessions and Other Digressions" (in which Slimer from Ghostbusters's musings appear alongside a drink recipe from Bloody Mary and "a delightful essay on financial management by Jacob Marley"), or Matt Bell with his piece on expanding possibilities, embrace the blurb form as a starting point for a really good riff. Some, like Christopher Higgs's skewering of the typically hyperbolic blurb for the Book-That-Has-Everything: "ghosts, pirates, cowboys, robots, dinosaurs, ninjas," etc. make a gentle mockery of it. Some of the blurbs play with the form, like Diane Williams's hilariously self-conscious blurb, or Shane Jones, Aimee Bender, and Brian Allen Carr's blurbs about the books' potentially dangerous effects on the reader. And some, like Susan Daitch's warning, Blake Butler's short satire of total indifference to books, or...