The Imagined Library Books that were never written

The Neverending Story  ·  Fantasy

The Neverending Story

also known as Die unendliche Geschichte

Unknown

Can I actually read this? Yes. Someone printed it. You can buy a copy. Published in our world

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.

Calvino withholds the rest of the book. Ende hands you the rest and then asks what you are going to do with it.

Bastian is a fat, unhappy child in a bookshop he should not be in, and the volume he steals has the same title as the volume you are holding. That is not a cute recursion. It is the whole engine. He reads about Atreyu; he reaches the place where Fantastica needs a name from outside; he understands, too late to remain a spectator, that he is the outside. The second half of the novel is the cost of that understanding. Naming is easy. Knowing when to stop naming, and how to get home, is the work.

The copper binding and the ouroboros on the cover of the first edition are not decoration. They are a claim: this object is the object. Fantastic Beasts escaped into our world by being written later. The Neverending Story escaped by being written as itself. You do not need a companion volume. You need to notice which side of the page you are on.

On the readability rating. Yes. Completely. The book Bastian cannot put down is the book on the table. What remains unfinished is not the text. It is the invitation.

In-world history

Bastian finds it in an antiquarian bookshop, is told by the proprietor that it is not for him, and steals it. The story of Atreyu occupies the first half. At the centre of the volume, the Childlike Empress asks for a new name, and Bastian, who has been reading, speaks. After that he is in Fantastica, and the pages ahead of him are no longer only paper.

Why it matters

The rare case in which the book-within-the-book and the book-in-your-hands are the same object, and the plot is what happens when a reader notices. Ende wrote a novel about the ethics of continuing a story.

Appearances

  • The Neverending Story (1979) — Michael Ende Bastian Balthazar Bux steals the book from Mr Coreander's shop and reads himself into it

Editions in our world

  • Die unendliche Geschichte, Michael Ende (Thienemann, 1979) The book Bastian reads is this book. Translations follow. The copper-silk binding of the first edition is doing the same work as Harry's defaced Fantastic Beasts: making the object you buy rhyme with the object in the story.

Connected volumes

Catalogue record

Category
Fantasy
World
The Neverending Story
Imagined by
Michael Ende
Language
The copy in the bookshop is in German; Bastian reads it anyway
First appearance
Die unendliche Geschichte (Thienemann, 1979)
Readability
Published in our world
Books That Escaped Into Reality Books Within Books Infinite Books

Sources

  • Michael Ende, Die unendliche Geschichte (Thienemann, 1979). English translation by Ralph Manheim (Doubleday, 1983).

Added by house · last checked 2026-09-01