The Logogryph

Via Miriam: Thomas Watson’s The Logogryph: A Bibliography of Imaginary Books, apparently just published. Especially apropos as we’re doing Don Quixote this week in Technologies of Writing. It begins:

The particular volume I’m looking for is nameless, lacking a cover, title page, or any other outward markings of identity. Over the centuries its leaves have known nothing but change. They have been removed, replaced, altered, lost. The nameless book has been bound, taken apart, and reassembled with the pieces of other dismembered volumes, until one could ask whether there is anything left of the original. Or if there ever was an original.

Miriam mentions Borges; the premise also reminds me of Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves (for which a PDF typescript is said to have circulated online before the printed publication—I’ve never seen it) and, of course, the eldritch patron of them all.