A working sketch
About the library
A catalogue of books that were never written. Most of them are not impossible, only imagined. A few you can still read.
The Imagined Library collects volumes that exist inside other books — novels, plays, encyclopaedias, newspapers, films, the odd cartridge — and files each one as a catalogue record: what it is, why it matters, and the real page a human being can check.
It is not a wiki, and it is not a reprint series. The entries are original criticism. The quotations are evidence for that criticism, kept short and attributed. Nothing here is meant to save anyone a trip to the host work.
Can I actually read this?
That is the only question the catalogue answers on a single scale, from mention-only up to books that escaped into print. You can buy a book called Necronomicon and still not have read Lovecraft's invention. One honest axis can hold that. A badge cannot. The full ranking is at Can I read it?
How a volume gets in
Every entry carries at least one source. The build fails without one. A catalogue of things that do not exist cannot tell its own errors apart from its own content, so nothing is invented here: AI may draft and find candidates; a person checks the host work before anything is merged.
Visitors suggest. Suggestions file as GitHub issues and stay off the shelves until they have been looked up. Nothing a visitor types becomes catalogue text.
Quotation
Short, attributed, link-out. We quote the host work, never a reconstruction assembled into an anthology, never a game-book in full. The rule is at /quotation.
If you hold the rights
If a passage quoted here is yours and you want it shortened or removed, say so. This is a sketch of a library, not a hill. Write to the operator of imaginedlibrary.com, published by the GitHub user j-nilesh.