Naked on My Goat, Louise Brooks' lost book, included in new exhibit

For those who mat not know, the Grolier Club is a private club and society devoted to books and the book arts. The group is located in New York City. Founded in 1884, it is the oldest existing bibliophilic club in North America. The Grolier's mission is "the literary study of the arts pertaining to the production of books, including the occasional publication of books designed to illustrate, promote and encourage these arts; and the acquisition, furnishing and maintenance of a suitable club building for the safekeeping of its property, wherein meetings, lectures and exhibitions shall take place from time to time." The Grolier Club also maintain a library of more than 100,000 volumes devoted to the history of books.

I have never been to the club, but would certainly like to visit it someday as I have long had an interest in books, book collecting, and the book arts. In fact, my former employer at the Arion Press in San Francisco, noted printer Andrew Hoyem, was a member. I recall him speaking about the Grolier Club on a number of occasions.

As mentioned, the Grolier Club hosts exhibitions related to books and print culture. Currently on display at the club is "Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works From the Collection of Reid Byers" (through February 15, 2025). In short, it is an exhibit of books which only exist in other books.

This description comes from the Grolier Club website: "Part bibliophilic entertainment and part conceptual art installation, Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books features a collection of books that do not really exist. Curated by Grolier Club member Reid Byers, the exhibition includes approximately 100 books and associated arealia from his collection—all simulacra created with a team of printers, bookbinders, artists, and calligraphers—of lost books that have no surviving example, unwritten books that were planned but left unfinished, and fictive works that exist only in fiction. Highlights of the exhibition include William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Won, the lost sequel to Love’s Labour’s Lost; Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, stolen from his wife’s bag on a French train in 1922; and the Necronomicon, John Dee’s copy of the eldritch grimoire that has been kept sealed in a Wells Fargo strongbox, as a precaution, since the Krickle accident of 1967."

This exhibit came to my attention when it received a write-up by critic (and LB fan?*) Michael Dirda in the Washington Post. Dirda mention one of the books on display. That book was Louise Brooks' legendary destroyed manuscript, Naked on My Goat. (Click HERE to see the exhibition web page devoted to the book, which is highlighted below.)

LOUISE BROOKS

Naked on My Goat 

 

New York

Scribner’s

1954

Burned by the author. 

 

"Brooks, an American actress and international movie star, never achieved the same success in her home country and in her mid-thirties withdrew to a life of alcohol and high-end prostitution. Brooks was bright and well-read, and during this period she wrote this tell-all memoir. The title she took from the speech of the Young Witch in the Walpurgisnacht scene of Goethe’s Faust, a speech delivered in the eponymous condition. She later incinerated the manuscript." -- Reid Byers

 

Naked on My Goat, whose title is drawn from Goethe, is included in "Imaginary Books" in the section devoted to Abandoned Books along with titles by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath and others. I don't know about Karl Marx, who is also in the section, but it occurs to me that each of the authors in this section had an issue with substance abuse.

The exhibit has received a fair amount of press. The New York Times called it an “…irresistible conceptual-art installation.” Michael Dirda, the only critic to mention Brooks, described "Imaginary Books" as "learnedly entertaining as Byers’s earlier study, “The Private Library,” was exhaustive and magisterial". Elsewhere, the Guardian called it  “…a very elaborate and whimsical bit taken to its most creative extremes [by] Reid Byers …​ a good-natured expert on private libraries and rabbit holes.

However it has been described, it seems well worth checking out. The exhibition remains on view at the Grolier Club in New York City through February 15 before traveling to the Book Club of California in San Francisco, where it will be on display March 18 through July 21. (I hope to see it there.) Notably, an accompanying book will be published by Oak Knoll and Club Fortsas. (Click HERE for more information or to purchase a copy.) I assume it will include a passage on Naked on My Goat.... which makes it something to look for and add to my collection of books about Louise Brooks.  

For more about the artist, Reid Byers, be sure and check out his website at https://reidbyers.com/

Although Louise Brooks reportedly destroyed the manuscript of Naked on My Goat by throwing it into an incinerator, it still managed to get a bit of attention while it existed. Here is a rare press clipping which actually mentions the book. (Reportedly, a few passages from the book still exist... but don't ask me where, or in which forgotten closet they are kept....) For now, fans of the actress will have to content ourselves with Reid Byers' simulacra.

I don't know if Reid Byers' edition of Louise Brooks' Naked on My Goat has the "author's" bookplate in it, but if it does, it may well have this design by Frank Papé. This is Brooks' actual bookplate, which could be found inside many of the books from her personal library. Brooks loved books, and was serious enough about her personal library that she had these bookplates printed with her name on them. Below is an image of Brooks' bookplate inside one of the actress' books.

* I suggest the possibility of Michael Dirda (an author and Pulitzer Prize winning columnist) being a Brooks admirer because he has written about the actress in the past, including a review of Brooks' memoir, Lulu in Hollywood, following its actual publication in 1982. She is also mentioned in Dirda's Book by Book (2005).

THE LEGAL STUFF: The Louise Brooks Society™ blog is authored by Thomas Gladysz, Director of the Louise Brooks Society  (www.pandorasbox.com). Original contents copyright © 2025. Further unauthorized use prohibited. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.