Tucked in the back of Reid Byers’ North Deering home is a room any book lover would envy: shelves stacked with thousands of books, some so high you need a ladder to reach them, all softly illuminated by warm lamplight. But only a trained observer would catch on to the secret: Much of Byers’ book collection doesn’t actually exist.

There’s Hemingway’s missing first novel, lost when his wife’s bag was stolen in Paris. There’s Sylvia Plath’s never finished, semi-autobiographical “Double Exposure.” There’s even the backwards-printed book Alice finds through the looking glass.

Byers, a 78-year-old Portland resident, has spent the past 15 years tracking down references to lost, unfinished or fictional books. Alongside a small team, he creates physical representations of what these volumes might have looked like, portals to worlds that could have been. His work has since become a renowned collection, filled with tangible copies of imaginary books.

“It’s a bunch of little inside jokes,” Byers said. “And if you’ve read the book that it’s making fun of, they’re funny. And if not, they’re kind of interesting, but curious.”

There are three types of books Byers considers bringing into existence: Books that once existed but we don’t have copies of, books that are unfinished and never published, and books that are fictive, only appearing as a reference in other works of literature.

The collection includes Lord Byron’s memoirs, which were intentionally destroyed in a fire, Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labour’s Won” and Homer’s lost “Margites,” which Byers describes as “Lucille Ball 2800 years ago.”

One of Byers’ favorites is “Shakespeare in Baby Talk,” a book Raymond Chandler threatened to write, but never did.

Byers’ work has gained substantial attention, exhibited at the Grolier Club in New York City and currently at the Book Club of California in San Francisco. The collection is coming to the Glickman Library at the University of Southern Maine on Jan. 20.

Byers was previously a journalist in the Navy, a Presbyterian minister, a computer programmer and an IT architect with IBM, but “that’s not interesting,” he said. “What’s interesting is what happened before and after.”

To help pay for his private high school, Byers was assigned a work-study job in the library. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me, because I learned that I love to mess around with books,” he said.

In retirement, he has published two books, one on private libraries and the other on his imaginary book collection, called “Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books.” Byers also serves as president of the Baxter Society, a Portland literary club founded in 1983.

Byers started thinking about imaginary books when he was coming up with fake book titles to include on a hidden door that opened to a private library. Eventually he decided he wasn’t satisfied with just naming the books, but instead wanted to create a version of what imaginary books would have looked like.

“It’s a heartache,” Byers said. “Some of these books you want so badly.”

The first in his collection was “Poetics II: On Comedy” by Aristotle, the lost second book of the surviving “Poetics.” The last existing copy was burned in a monastery in 1327. “Imagine if we knew what Aristotle thought was funny,” Byers said.

The Game

The “game,” as Byers describes it, is to create the most authentic version of a book that never existed.

He works with Portland-based bookbinder Martha Kearsley, of Strong Arm Bindery, and calligrapher Margo Dittmer. He also enlists the help of a magician, a “black belt photoshopper” and Jeffrey Altepeter, a Boston bookbinder who has done facsimile work for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Some volumes Byers creates entirely on his own.

Dittmer worked on half a dozen books for the collection, lettering books in Greek, Latin and English. She used a variety of techniques to age the copies to match their appropriate time period, using tools like an X-ACTO blade and fine grit sandpaper.

“When I saw the exhibit all together, I just burst out laughing,” Dittmer said of her experience visiting the Grolier Club exhibition this winter. “It was so clever. I was blown away.”

It has taken over a decade for Byers to amass his imaginary collection. His criteria for choosing his books include whether he can picture the book visually, how many people will understand the reference and how the books will fit in with the rest of his collection. The collection includes categories such as lost books from ancient Greece, imaginary books for young people, mystery stories and imaginary science fiction.

The cost and time of the book production varies drastically. Some books have been nearly free to make, while others have cost over $1,000. Similarly, a book can take as short as a day to create, or months.

“I have a shopping list of probably one hundred books I’d like to work on for the future,” Byers said. Most recently, he has been working on creating a copy of “Proteus,” a lost play by Aeschylus.

And what happens if you open an imaginary book? Don’t even try, said Byers.

“These books are magical,” he said. “For technical, thaumaturgical reasons, they cannot be opened.” The truth is, the simulacra are mostly blank on the inside.

Shira Buchsbaum, the director of exhibitions at the Grolier Club, said the show has something for everyone, spanning genres and time periods – from ancient Greece to the distant future. “It was endlessly fun and entertaining, and really joyful for people to realize that they’ve been brought in on one of the most elaborate bits that they’ve ever experienced,” Buchsbaum said. “It touches everyone.”

Byers told Buchsbaum the imaginary books were simply on loan from their permanent home with the Fortsas Club in Paris. Which, it turns out, is an imaginary club with headquarters that lead to a facade building holding nothing but a smokestack.

But while the real fate of the imaginary books remains a mystery, Byers himself is happily based in Maine, where, he said, on a good day he can “see all the way to Wonderland.”