The non-existent manuscript - a brief note on fictional books and bibliomania

Bibliomania manifests in many different ways. One of those ways is to nurture an intense fondness for books that do not exist, save in some fictional universe. Reading about fictional books is a sheer delight to me, partly because I have a great love of the book as a concept and as a manifestation of humanity's creativity and drive towards beauty, and partly because of what the mere existence of such a book implies about the fictional universe in which it exists. To produce a book requires of human skill, necessitates material resources, and can only be done through some sort of infrastructure by which those resources and the skills are brought together. A fictional book, in other words, adds a greater depth to the complexity of a made-up world, just as a real book adds greater depth to the real world. This depth is especially great and wonderful when done with care, and when it serves as a vehicle for displaying the learning and the knowledge of the author of this double fiction of world and book. 

Fictional books are very common in literature. The conceit of having found a lost manuscript from which your own fiction stems, is a playful way of creating a greater degree of verisimilitude in a story. The wonderful and at times wonderfully absurd toying with, and stretching of, the line between fiction and reality in Don Quijote, for instance, is partly done through the claim that the tale comes a manuscript written by Cide Hamete Benengeli. Similarly, Adso of Melk's account of his experiences together with his master William of Baskerville in Umberto Eco's Name of the rose is given a curious and unstable sheen of realism through the prologue of a found and then lost-again manuscript.  

There are many famous fictional books, and I believe it is no exaggeration to suggest that there are even more fictional books that are known to a much more limited number of readers, or that are known only for a shorter period of time and within specific readerships. Some fictional books do transcend the readerships of the real books in which they appear, perhaps because they are discussed and talked about by readers who also write, and thereby become more famous than the real book - the vehicle, as it were, of the fictional book. For instance, the fictional books of the real library of the abbey of Saint-Victor in Paris included by Rabelais in the first book of Pantagruel, has been mentioned by several authors. These mentions mean that there are likely to be readers who will be familiar with the list, and might even know parts or all of it by heart, without actually having read Rabelais. Such famous fictional books are not rare, but there are probably more fictional books which are likely to remain known to a more limited group of readers, or what we might justly call the fandom of a book or a book series. 

What spurred on these reflections on fictional books and my intense delight in them was a recent issue in one of my favourite comic book series, the Italian Western series Tex Willer, which is very popular in Norway. The issue in question - number 708 in Norway, number 748 in Italy - is written by Moreno Burattini and drawn by Michele Rubini. The story deals with the appearance of a blood-sucking monster in Northern Mexico, a chupacabra, or goat-sucker. The title of the issue is 'La mesa della follia', which in Norwegian has been translated roughly as the crag or mountain of horror ('Redselsberget'). This translation, however, is likely to miss one of the points of the original, as 'follia' means madness - as shown by the in-text Spanish name of the mountain as 'mesa del locura', or the mountain of madness. The title is, in other words, a likely nod to H. P. Lovecraft's famous tale. 

The issue is the first of a two-part story, and the it begins with a bag of bones brought to one of the recurring characters of the series, an Egyptian scientist living in Mexico, who is known by the epithet El Morisco. The search of the animal of these mysterious bones leads the scientist to an old abbey, in which he is shown a manuscript who was brought by a traveller. El Morisco analyzes the book, notes that it is written partly in German and partly in Latin, he recognizes alchemical signs, and dates it to the fifteenth century based on abbreviations in the text which, as he says, are typical of that period. The last page of the manuscript, as seen below, shows a drawing of a horrible cat-like beast, with the subtitle 'bestia quae sanguinem sugit', the beast who sucks blood.           

What delights me about this fictional book is partly how it continues a long and wonderful literary game of verisimilitude through the conceit of the found manuscript, and partly how both author and artist are able to create added verisimilitude through details such as the dating of the manuscript based on abbreviations, and on authentic-looking renditions of alchemical signs. Such attention to detail which strikes a chord in a historian such as myself - having worked on late-medieval manuscripts and codicological puzzles - is perhaps especially delightful when we consider the medium, namely a monthly comic book. This statement is not to be taken as as disparaging commentary about monthly comics, I am myself an avid reader of this particular one. Rather, the point is that monthly comic books are often aimed at a month-long readership who will then move on to the next issue, and then the next. While the publishers no doubt expect collectors, and while we should expect that there are several readers who do re-read these issues several times, a comic like Tex Willer is sold in a short-term market where each issue is relatively swiftly replaced with the next. In such a market, attention to detail is no doubt appreciated by many readers, and might even be what attracts several of those readers, but these details are probably not seen as the defining factor of the success of the series. Instead, the success is more likely attributed to the creation of mystery, the gun fights, the heroism of the protagonists, and the setting, the Old West, which still retains such a forceful grip on the European imagination. Because such attention to detail is not necessary, it becomes all the more delightful. This attention to detail comes from some place of love, whether it is a love of literary games, of verisimilitude, of codicology, of authenticity, of the series itself, of creating such nods that only a part of the readership will recognize. And such acts of love that lies in this attention to detail is in itself a form of bibliomania, which in turn adds even more delight to the matter.