{"id":173957,"date":"2026-06-09T10:00:43","date_gmt":"2026-06-09T14:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=173957"},"modified":"2026-06-08T12:28:37","modified_gmt":"2026-06-08T16:28:37","slug":"the-vanishing-library-timothy-elys-odd-little-book-from-outer-space","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/06\/09\/the-vanishing-library-timothy-elys-odd-little-book-from-outer-space\/","title":{"rendered":"The Vanishing Library: Timothy Ely\u2019s Odd Little Book from Outer Space"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n
\"\"

Borderline<\/em> by Timothy Ely, front (left) and back (right) cover. Photographs by Max Ross.<\/p><\/div>\n

Late in the week I got an email from one of my book dealers. He was at a fair in New York and thought he\u2019d found a buyer for Timothy Ely\u2019s Borderline<\/i><\/span>, a unique artist\u2019s book I\u2019d placed with him on consignment. It was welcome news; we\u2019d been trying to sell Borderline<\/i><\/span>\u00a0<\/i>for two years. Before traveling to New York, he\u2019d asked if we might lower the price, from ten thousand dollars to seven thousand and five hundred, and I\u2019d agreed that it seemed like time.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Nothing was finalized, my dealer said, but he was optimistic. The prospective buyer had asked to be looped in if anyone else made an offer, and also wanted to know more about the book\u2019s provenance. In my reply I explained how it had come into my possession: My father, a lawyer and book collector, had done some legal work for the founder of Granary Books, a publisher specializing in artists\u2019 editions. As payment, he was able to buy titles from Granary at cost. He\u2019d acquired a dozen or so through this arrangement, and <\/span>Borderline<\/span><\/i> was one of them. I\u2019d inherited it when he\u2019d died, about four years earlier.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t want to sell <\/span>Borderline<\/span><\/i>, exactly. Like all the books I\u2019d inherited, it was a little holy to me. To let it go would be to let go of another part of my father. I didn\u2019t want to let more of him go. I\u2019d begun to feel I was erasing him, forsaking him. He\u2019d built his collection over four decades: a few hundred titles\u2014first editions, special editions, illustrated editions\u2014that, taken together, expressed him as vividly as a self-portrait. I knew who my father was because I\u2019d worked to understand his tastes. His shelves held Joyce, Borges, Wallace Stevens, Frank O\u2019Hara, John Ashbery; invention, philosophy, sensitivity, sensuality, beauty.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

(He\u2019d joked once, after coming out, that he\u2019d never been in the closet but between book covers.)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I\u2019d sold most of his collection indiscriminately. Idiotically. I\u2019d had only a long weekend to clear his house after he died. I was in a fugue state of grief and made decisions rashly. An edition of <\/span>Animal Farm <\/span><\/i>that I sold for five hundred dollars was listed by its buyer for twenty-five hundred the next month. I accidentally included a copy of <\/span>Lysistrata<\/span><\/i> that was illustrated and signed by Picasso in a grocery bag of detective novels I dropped off at a Goodwill. Now, four years later, I clung to the books of his I still had, afraid I would squander them, too.<\/span><\/p>\n

But I couldn\u2019t keep <\/span>Borderline<\/span><\/i>. It didn\u2019t belong to me. I mean this metaphysically. I\u2019d made a rule early on that, in order to keep one of my father\u2019s books, I needed to be able to make it <\/span>mine<\/span><\/i>. A simple process: I would pick up a book, and, if it vibrated with magic, it was mine. Some did, some didn\u2019t. I knew instantly. An early edition of <\/span>Lunch Poems<\/span><\/i>. A custom-bound <\/span>Ulysses<\/span><\/i>. Arion Press\u2019s <\/span>Trout Fishing in America<\/span><\/i>.<\/span> \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Borderline<\/span><\/i> was inert. It\u2019s less a book than a book-object. Published in 1989, its pages are filled with maps, charts, drawings of landmasses and planets. I think it\u2019s supposed to be an atlas of an imagined universe, but it\u2019s hard to say for sure. There\u2019s no narrative; there\u2019s nothing to read. It\u2019s sixteen pages, about as thick as my pinky. The few words it contains are indecipherable, of no language. (The letters look Hebrew\u2014if you don\u2019t know Hebrew and have never seen Hebrew letters before.) The artist, Ely, created his own system of glyphs, which he derived from his studies of ciphers, cryptographs, hieroglyphs, calligraphy, alchemy, Kabbalah, UFO communications in sci-fi novels, and other synthetic languages. Flipping through <\/span>Borderline<\/span><\/i>, you get the sensation you\u2019ve uncovered an artifact from another dimension, somewhere both ancient and futuristic.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My father, I knew, responded to this type of artistic obsessiveness. He was drawn to the idea that Ely had spent years building a world that wasn\u2019t really meant for anyone else: an exercise in absurdity and rigorousness and care. He also admired the book\u2019s craftsmanship, how Ely had dyed the paper and tied the spine. The mastery appealed to him and he liked examining it with his own hands. But when I handled <\/span>Borderline<\/span><\/i>, my only thoughts were about how valuable it was and how careful I had to be with it. All it meant to me was that it had meant something to my father. This wasn\u2019t enough, I\u2019d learned, to make it magic.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

All weekend, as I took my daughter from playground to playground in Berkeley, I waited to hear if the sale had been finalized. Thoughts of my father popped in and out of mind.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

He\u2019d been a private person, his interests had been solitary interests: reading, running, computer chess. I\u2019d taken after him and was one of very few people who could share his privacy. We went running together and played chess together and read together, different books in the same room. But in my late twenties, shortly after finishing a graduate program in writing, I\u2019d created a schism between us. I published a novella about him in a literary magazine, centering on his sexuality. It included what he\u2019d told me about his first encounters with men, in his early forties; his ongoing relationship with my mother; his struggle to figure out why it had taken him so long to understand himself. It wasn\u2019t a mean portrait, but I exposed him in ways he had no choice over; I turned his privacy public. We both lived in Minneapolis then and still got together every week for dinner, but he was more guarded after the novella came out, wary I would mine him for more material.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One evening I went to his house and we played a few games of chess at his dining room table. He was a stronger player than I was and in one of our games he dismantled my position, removing pawn after pawn, so that my king was vulnerable to multiple lines of attack.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThere,\u201d he said, reaching across the board and tapping my king. \u201cThat\u2019s about how I feel.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI know,\u201d I said.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI know you know,\u201d he said. \u201cSo that\u2019s that. And now, we play again.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a lousy thing to write about people you love. But I also understand my twentysomething self\u2019s motives. I was a sophomore in high school when my father came out. Afterward, he often seemed like two people to me: the father I knew, and a new, independent\u2014and suddenly sexualized\u2014person who felt like a stranger. This stranger came with us everywhere: dinners, runs, museums, movies, chess. I found him unnerving. <\/span>Who was this man?<\/span> But I also sensed I needed to become comfortable with him, to reconcile him with the more familiar father. Writing provided the way. My novella, I suppose, was an attempt to chart out an atlas to the twin universes within him.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI am part pre-Gutenberg, part Victorian, and part Martian,\u201d Timothy Ely has said of himself. \u201cI was a stoker on the Nautilus. I swept up after William Morris.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Looking at his work from the past forty years, you might start to suspect this statement isn\u2019t a self-description so much as a coded set of coordinates. Ely has made dozens of books in the course of his career, and each one of them is unique, a one-of-a-kind key to a one-of-a-kind place and time. They\u2019re so meticulously constructed that it\u2019s easy to believe he drew on firsthand experience of these spaces\u2014even though they don\u2019t exist. (Many of the books are kept in various terrestrial libraries, including the collections at Princeton, Yale, and the University of Texas, Austin.)<\/span><\/p>\n

He\u2019s traced the genesis of his career to a single day in graduate school, when he discovered the map collection in the basement of the Suzzallo Library at the University of Washington. There he found maps that broadened his worldview\u2014or, more accurately, his universeview. Maps of air currents, the ocean floor, the solar system, Mars. Maps of anywhere you couldn\u2019t actually go. He returned again and again. Over time, two ideas became central to his work: maps can be a means of expression; and it\u2019s okay not to understand what fascinates you, and live instead within the fascination.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDiscovering the Atlas was being touched by God or Rand McNally,\u201d Ely has written. \u201cIt is about being awake and fully formed. The experience stands out for me as precisely how I see creativity working\u2014connections are established, points connected and gelation occurs.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Every October, he celebrates the day he first visited the map collection.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

When my father became sick the distance between us collapsed. He lived with cancer for six years. I\u2019d moved to the Bay Area by then\u2014my girlfriend had taken a job in San Francisco\u2014but I flew to Minneapolis frequently. I was with my father in the hospital for his first surgery and stayed with him as he convalesced, helping him around his house and picking up his prescriptions and groceries. I visited him through chemotherapy and radiation treatments, a sepsis scare, more surgeries, more treatments, the cessation of treatments. Meanwhile I was developing my own life. In these years I got engaged, then married, and became a parent myself. I was aware this all may have been catalyzed in some way by my father\u2019s illness; I wanted him to see, before he died, that I\u2019d established a life for myself.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I no longer wrote fiction; my time was taken up with parenthood and my career. I worked in tech marketing now, a job that paid well enough to support my life in the Bay Area. But by the end of most days I\u2019d used up the energy that once went into more personal projects. I journaled and occasionally sketched out story arcs, but I never finished anything. Now and then I could see the shape of a narrative forming from my father\u2019s ordeal\u2014but whenever I began writing I felt guilty, and put what pages I\u2019d drafted in the recycling bin by my desk.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

He spent his last year in Palm Springs, to be near a cousin he\u2019d grown up with. There was no winter there. I would visit every month or so\u2014every two weeks, toward the end. He would ask me to bring him books: <\/span>Dubliners<\/span><\/i>,<\/span> Billy Budd<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>The Death of Ivan Ilyich<\/span><\/i>. He spent the year rereading great writers in the sun. On my last trip I took home all the books I\u2019d loaned him. Penguin Classics editions, mostly. They\u2019d been mine to begin with, but now they vibrate a little, too.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

The next Tuesday morning my book dealer emailed to say that <\/span>Borderline<\/span><\/i> had sold. I wasn\u2019t surprised to find I was regretful. Another piece of my father gone, on some anonymous buyer\u2019s shelf.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I reminded myself I\u2019d never connected with <\/span>Borderline.<\/span><\/i> But I had, at least, connected with my father. There were parts of him I\u2019d never fully understand\u2014but I would never be divested of my fascination with him. Not everything of his had to become mine.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As we\u2019d agreed, my dealer would get a 20 percent commission. Likewise, the buyer got a 20 percent discount, because he was also a book dealer. (I didn\u2019t quite understand this, but apparently it\u2019s industry standard.) Half of what was left would go to my sister, whom I haven\u2019t mentioned because I\u2019m forbidden to write about her. A chunk would go to taxes. The rest would go to my mortgage. Another sort of magic: Watch as I turn this library into interest payments. Poof.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Max Ross is a writer and occasional bookseller.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe few words it contains are indecipherable, of no language. (The letters look Hebrew\u2014if you don\u2019t know Hebrew and have never seen Hebrew letters before.)\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":504,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31215],"tags":[23527,9002,30645,67827,8032,14005,8424,635,68867,946],"class_list":["post-173957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-books","tag-allegorical-maps","tag-animal-farm","tag-book-collecting","tag-featured","tag-first-person-2","tag-lunch-poems","tag-maps","tag-memoir","tag-timothy-ely","tag-ulysses"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Vanishing Library: Timothy Ely\u2019s Odd Little Book from Outer Space by Max Ross<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"June 9, 2026 \u2013 \u201cThe few words it contains are indecipherable, of no language. 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