Books Do Furnish a Room and Temporary Kings, the tenth and eleventh novels in A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell’s great roman fleuve, portray the literary life in postwar England, and both volumes are accordingly full of non-existent novels and other books “written” or referred to by Powell’s fictional characters.
Two of these imaginary books, X. Trapnel’s Camel Ride to the Tomb and Profiles in String, are central to the plot, but the others are merely mentioned in passing, and Powell, who had an insufficiently appreciated knack for pastiche and parody, clearly had fun with the titles:
Athlete’s Footman
Bedsores
Bin Ends
Bronstein: Marxist or Mystagogue?
The Bitch Pack Meets on Wednesday
Borage and Hellebore: A Study
Descartes, Gasendi, and the Atomic Theory of Epicurus
Dogs Have No Uncles
Dust Thou Art
Fields of Amaranth
Garnered at Sunset: Leaves from an Edwardian Journal
Golden Grime
I Stopped at a Chemist
Kleist, Marx, Sartre, the Existentialist Equilibrium
Match Me Such Marvel
Miscellaneous Equities
Moss off a Rolling Stone
The Pistons of Our Locomotives Sing the Songs of Our Workers
Paper Wine
Purged Not in Lethe
Sad Majors
Secretions
Slow on the Feather
A Stockbroker in Sandals
Sweetskin
Unburnt Boats
I’d gladly read some of those–wouldn’t you?