Michele’s Comments (group member since Dec 06, 2011)

Michele’s comments from the Arrangement and Description: Archivists At Large group.

The Greatest Books that Never Were, article on Salon.com from this past July. Excerpt:

"Imaginary books seem to be nearly as numerous as the real ones, and that’s even when you don’t count all those bestselling thrillers people believe they’ll write someday if only they can find the time to write the damn thing down. Nonexistent books certainly have some devoted fans, such as the proprietor of the ever-diverting Beachcomber’s Bizarre History Blog, who is making bold moves to expand the collection known as the Invisible Library..."

A toss-up between The Library of Dream, in Neil Gaiman's series, and the Library of Babel (Borges).

The former is a collection of all the books never written, for example G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was October (possibly a sequel to his actual book The Man Who Was Thursday?) and of course lots and lots of titles like The Best-selling Romantic Spy Thriller I Used to Think About on the Bus.

The latter contains all possible book-length combinations of the letters of the alphabet (with spaces and punctuation), meaning that every book ever written or unwritten is there, but so is a lot of meaningless drivel like "To be or not to be, wopi ne skg ienxuweo..."

Either one would be great to browse in, though the chances of finding something good is probably higher in the Library of Dream :)

Welcome! I'm an archivist myself and I really enjoy books that feature archives, archivists, or archival research as an important part of the plot, like The Historian. Since archives often consist of old books, letters, documents, photographs, etc., by extension I enjoy those as well, like 84, Charing Cross Road / The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street.

Although there are some lists out on the interwebz of books that feature libraries and librarians, and sometimes archives/archivists, I couldn't find a GoodReads group centered around that idea, so I thought I'd start one and see what we get. It's an open group, so feel free to recommend it to others :)

Who's your favorite fictional archivist and why?

What is your favorite fictional archives and why?