Bestselling novelist and award winning comics writer Neil Gaiman is the latest author to submit a conceptual book idea to the Hypothetical Library, a fanciful blogsite launched by book designer Charles Orr that creates jacket designs for imaginary books—books that don't really exist—from very real authors.
On Monday the Hypothetical Library will unveil If You Read This Book The World Will End, the first of a three-part presentation based on Gaiman’s imaginary book. For the first time, Orr has also commissioned a sculptor to create a physical fabrication of the imaginary book which will be featured today. On Thursday May 20 the site will unveil an audiobook version of Gaiman’s imaginary book, and next Monday May 24 the site will debut an unusual new digital interactive book cover/puzzle that will bring the cover art to life.
In an interview, Orr, who has designed book jackets for real books for several major trade book publishers, said the idea for the Hypothetical Library came from “the power of book jackets to embody a book. They’re iconic and crucial to the reading experience.” Many authors seem to agree and he’s received imaginary book proposals from a wide variety of fiction and nonfiction authors.
Launched earlier this year, the Hypothetical Library is an effort by Orr to show the power of well designed cover art and its ability to invoke a book’s content even when the book doesn’t really exist. To create these imaginary books, Orr asks well-known writers to come up with ideas for books they really have no intention of writing and provide the flap copy and blurbs. Orr then takes this copy and comes with a cover design.
Over the last few months Orr has designed hypothetical cover art for books by National Book Award winning novelist Colum McCann (In the Country Below), novelist Lydia Millet and her husband, environmentalist Kieran Suckling (Apocalypse Animal; with an imaginary blurb by novelist Jonathan Lethem), novelist Thomas Kelly (Metropolis: A Novel of New York City in the 1950s) and cartoonist Gabrielle Bell’s ‘hypothetical” graphic novel adaptation (Valerie Solanas’s S.C.U.M. Manifesto).
For the Gaiman project, Orr says he got lucky. He e-mailed Gaiman a proposal and put the author on the Hypothetical Library’s mailing list. To Orr’s surprise, he got a message back from Gaiman. “I was amazed that he got back to me,” Orr said. Orr worked with Gaiman and his assistant to approve all the jacket copy and images. “I’ve kept him up to date and showed him everything as we went along,” said Orr.
“The trouble with imagining a book I would never write is that when I think of it, I think "But I could WRITE that,” wrote Gaiman. The result of this exchange is If You Read This Book The World Will End. Gaiman decided to come up with a book that he couldn’t possibly write, indeed, if the title is any indication, it’s a book no one should actually try to read. To complete the project Orr used graphic novelist Nick Abadzis for the voice on the audiobook; sculptor Kevin Johnson created the bolted and locked book form and photographer Seth Kushner took the photo.
“Book jackets are the gateway to finding and experiencing a book,” said Orr, “in the age of e-books, I just want to keep that going.”
