Books That Escaped Into Reality

A dictionary of the opinions one is supposed to have, planned by two clerks as the only project left after agriculture, medicine, love, and archaeology have defeated them.

A standard Hogwarts textbook classifying the magical creatures of the world, and one of the few fictional books you can order tonight and have on your desk tomorrow.

An Arabic history of a knight, found in the Alcana of Toledo, translated by a Morisco for a few raisins and wheat, from which — so the frame insists — Don Quixote was put into Spanish.

A Sanskrit epic as long as the Ramayana, written by the woman who grew a city from seeds, whispered its citizens their lives, and at two hundred and forty-seven sealed the poem in a pot for whoever came after.

A cookery book by Nanny Ogg, published anonymously as "A Lady", in which almost every recipe turns out to be about something other than food.

The poems of a shepherd who does not believe in hidden meanings — written by a Lisbon clerk who needed a master that was not himself.

A play in two acts. The first is harmless, even banal. The second, once read, is not something a mind comes back from.

A letter from a fabulous Christian king beyond the Muslims, full of marvels and political convenience — which Baudolino says he helped to write, and which, in our world, really did circulate in the twelfth century.

The most famous book that does not exist. A grimoire of pre-human history and summoning rites, surviving in a handful of guarded copies, quoted just often enough to convince generations of readers it was real.

A copper-coloured book bound in silk, with two snakes swallowing each other on the cover, in which a lonely boy reads of a world that is dying for want of a name — and then writes one in.

A Florinese romance of true love and high adventure, abridged by a screenwriter who claims his father read it to him, leaving out the pages about packing and the history of Guilder.

A history of the game from the marshes of Queerditch to the modern professional leagues, borrowed from the Hogwarts library and never quite returned on time.

A red-leather manuscript of hobbit memoirs and translated Elvish lore, from which — so the frame insists — The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were translated into English.

The history of a sentient stone, left over from the repairing of the sky, that begged to see the world of red dust — copied off its own surface and read, in our world, as the great novel of a declining house.

A book of wizarding fairy tales left to Hermione Granger in Dumbledore's will. One of the five stories in it turns out to be the plot of the novel.

A Kilgore Trout novel that escaped the way Trout's stories usually do not: another writer finished it, put Trout's name on the cover, and sold it.

A picture book about a lost cow, read to a baby by the most dangerous man in Ankh-Morpork, at six o'clock, every single day, no matter what.