Bibliotheca Fantastica

4.3/5 ( ratings)

Stories within stories … twenty new fabulous tales of bibliophilic wonder, enchantment, terror, romance, mystery, and adventure…

Edited by Don Pizarro. Cover by Hugo award-winner artist, Galen Dara.

From the “Introduction”, by Don Pizarro:

“It seems fitting that fiction, one of the most time-honored ways of examining the complexity of human nature, also be applied to the examination of something as equally complex. Fiction about books in general has certainly been done before. Indeed, one might be tempted to dismiss this book about books, this Bibliotheca Fantastica, as an anthology of stories about Necronomicon knock-offs housed in spooky libraries, or of post-apocalyptic mutant book-worshippers living under St. Patrick’s Cathedral, or riffs on Borges’s Ficciones.

Yes, there are stories about books of power, and of libraries. There is a cathedral, and the name of Borges is invoked not once, but twice. But each of the stories in Bibliotheca Fantastica has, I believe, something unique to say about the importance of the book-as-artifact to those who shape them and to those who are shaped by them. These are stories in which the idea of a book and what it represents reaches beyond issues of form and function. Indeed, sometimes a book’s form is its function, and in this anthology the possibilities for both are limitless.”

Table of Contents

Don Pizarro, “Introduction”
Garry Kilworth, “The Secret Atlas”
Andrew S. Fuller, “The Crimson Codex”
David Sklar, “The Philosopher’s Nectar”
Megan Arkenberg, “The Gallery of Vespasian Marat”
Lydia S. Gray, “The Book of Doors”
Michael J. DeLuca, “Other Palimpsests”
Ray Vukcevich, “The Go-Between”
Yarrow Paisley, “Lynx“
J.S. Bangs, “The Typographer’s Folly”
A.C. Wise, “The Book of Her”
Todd T. Castillo, “Where Love is Written”
George S. Walker, “Cathedral Rising”
Ursula Pflug, “The Dreams of Trees”
S.J. Hirons, “Pages Torn From “Eminent Phantasists: A New Edition’”
Michael Skeet, “Read Me”
Trevor Shikaze, “The Fox and His Book”
Amber Polo, “Egyptian Holiday”
Tina Connolly, “Paperheart”
Colleen Anderson, “The Book With No End”
Gord Sellar, “The Rite“