Books Within Books
The library that fiction keeps inside itself.
14 volumes
Death keeps a library containing one book for every person who has ever lived or will live. Each writes itself, continuously, in real time, and stops mid-sentence.
A cloth-bound octavo bought from a Bible seller in Buenos Aires. It has infinite pages, none of which can ever be found twice.
A small brown book of the myths and legends of a dying Earth, carried across four volumes by a torturer who cannot forget anything he reads.
Volume XI of a forty-volume encyclopaedia describing a planet that does not exist, in such completeness that the planet begins to.
An incoherent manuscript left by a Chinese governor who abandoned power to write a novel and build a labyrinth. His heirs found the novel unreadable and the labyrinth missing. They were the same object.
A hostile, opportunistic, extensively researched biography published within weeks of its subject's death. Almost everything in it is true, which is the problem.
One of several biographies of Paul Atreides written by the woman who married him, never shared his bed, and was left with nothing to do but write the official record.
A twee picture book about a rabbit in trousers, found by a colony of newly intelligent rats, who take it for a description of how life could be.
The spellbook the Creator left behind after making the Discworld, containing the eight Great Spells. It is chained in the cellars of Unseen University, and it has opinions.
The genuinely lost second book of Aristotle's Poetics, dealing with comedy — reconstructed by Eco, hidden in a Benedictine library, and defended by a murderer who poisoned its pages.
The holy book of Omnia, assembled from the words of seven prophets, and enforced by an Inquisition. The god it describes has not been consulted about any of it.
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 body of philosophy consisting entirely of the everyday sayings of an Ankh-Morpork landlady, revered by monks who have mistaken exasperation for enlightenment.
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.