The Library of Unpublished Books
For years, manuscripts—handwritten, hunt-and-pecked, ink-smudged—have trickled in with the mail for the San Francisco Public Library’s Presidio branch. They come from aspiring authors in search of an unlikely home for their work: a library based on a book based on a library.
Specifically the manuscripts are meant for the fantastic archive of unpublished books depicted in novelist Richard Brautigan’s counterculture classic . But while the Presidio branch inspired peculiar library—its photo graces the book’s cover, and they share the same address—the unique repository is strictly the stuff of fiction. Or, at least, it the stuff of fiction. Today it’s library made manifest, a home for more than three hundred unpublished, bound manuscripts from all around the world. Here visitors can sit in wooden chairs or lie down on the fuzzy, multicolored rug and explore the dreams of strangers.
