Grolier

At the Grolier Club on the Upper East Side is an object never before displayed in public: an edition of one of Hemingway’s first novels, which was stolen when his first wife left a bag unattended on a train in 1922.

But there is a twist: The copy at the Grolier Club is itself a kind of fiction, part of an exhibition called “Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books,” curated by Reid Byers, a Maine-based collector and writer.

This, along with physical representations of more than 100 books that have been lost, unfinished or dreamed up by other writers, will be on display at the Grolier Club, from Thursday through Feb. 15.

“When the books arrived, our executive director joked, ‘These books are surprisingly heavy for being imaginary,’” Shira Belén Buchsbaum, exhibitions manager at the Grolier Club, recalled.

His Bible “was the first substantial book printed in the West from movable type,” George Fletcher, the author of “Gutenberg and the Genesis of Printing,” said during a recent interview at the Grolier Club in Manhattan, where I visited recently for an up-close look at some of Gutenberg’s printing, including loose leaves from his Bible.