Le Cool

Nestled between the old bookshops of Cecil Court is the Invisible Library. Its shelves are lined with books that don’t exist, but have appeared in other books. Rachel Gannon, Fumie Kamijo and Chloe Regan of the INK collective were inspired by The Invisible Library blog, and have taken works such as those of the prodigious Benno von Archimbaldi, from Roberto Bolano’s 2666, and made their imagined versions. They have asked real authors to begin writing some of the stories inside, and they invite the public to do the same: yes, you can take books from the shelves and scribble. ‘We do quite a lot of book illustration in our day-to-day work,’ Rachel told me at the opening, as visitors perched with pencils and scratched their heads for good opening lines. ‘So this felt like a natural progression.’

—Le Cool (London)