Earlier this summer, inspired by book-filled novels by Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov, I hit upon the idea of using the Internet to start a catalog of books that exist only within other books—a Borgesian invisible library. [. . .]

Come by for a visit: whether you find your fancy piqued by Odo Stevens’s wartime memoir Sad Majors or Fellowes Kraft’s Joseph-Campbellesque mythic exploration Time’s Body or Sebastian Knight’s little-understood first novel, The Prismatic Bezel, we promise you’ll leave empty-handed.

I think this is a really fun idea, and I’m sure there will be a ton of additions from Bolano’s Nazi Literature in the Americas in the near future.

“Well, well, there’s no accounting for tastes,” M. de Charlus had replied, and if yours, dear lady, is to spend your time with Mrs Todgers, Sarah Gamp and Mrs Harris I have nothing to say, but please let it be on an evening when I am not here.”

Fans of Dickens will recognize these three women as characters from Martin Chuzzlewit—and their names, you can surely imagine, were quite a surprise coming out of the Baron’s mouth.

A note accompanying the line explains:

M. de Charlus’s reference in the original is to Mme Pipelet, Mme Gibout and Mme Joseph Prudhomme, minor creations of hte nineteenth-century writers Eugene Sue and Henri Monnier. They are chosen as examples of women utterly lacking in social distinction: Mme Pipelet, for example, is a concierge. Three comparable characters from Dickens have been substituted.

As Levi points out, this isn’t a huge issue, but it is sort of weird, since in either case—leaving the names as were, or using ones from Dickens—an explanatory note is necessary . . .