For almost one-and-a-half centuries after the British Museum opened its domed Reading Room in May 1857, scholars from all over the world used to assemble there in order to access an incomparable collection of printed and manuscript materials. To study in that circular room lined with books to a height of thirty-odd feet was to experience the encyclopaedic illusion of being at the very centre of knowledge. Not until sections of the wall swung open so that functionaries could retrieve some of the treasures hidden behind them did it become clear to bewildered newcomers that those portals of discovery were lined not with books but with trompe-l'oeil imitations of closely shelved volumes. The twenty columns which support the great dome were also ‘covered with false book-backs’ to the same height.

Fake books are what you expect to find in the mansions of parvenus like the hero of Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925). A sceptical visitor to Gatsby's ‘high Gothic library’ was surprised to discover, however, that every book housed there was an ‘absolutely real’ and ‘bona-fide piece of printed matter’ with ‘pages and everything’, put there by someone who sustained the illusion of connoisseurship by showing that he ‘knew when to stop’: that is, he ‘didn't cut the pages’. Fake books are not what you expect to find in one of the world's great libraries.