Andy Martrich is a writer, archivist, co-editor of Hiding Press, and author of occasional books, most recently Sun Nailed to Water: A Hauntological Investigation of the Works of Thomas Meyer (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026).
Imaginary Libraries of the Nintendo
Entertainment System: A Directory
by Andy Martrich
Co-published with Counterpath
5.5 x 8.5, 86 pgs., color throughout, $25
ISBN 978-1-962365-14-7
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"Martrich formulates a dialogue within an archive’s false circulatory system: the 'imaginary' libraries of the late Nintendo Entertainment System. In libraries whose books are only representations within the directory, one is constrained to a series of actions substituting for reading. The archive itself becomes a vestigial surface; a directory opening onto fabricated specters of the sought object. Here, the seeker of memory or knowledge is forced to regard the archive as they would their mirror image." —Nicole Raziya Fong
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"I first read Andy Martrich’s Imaginary Libraries of the Nintendo Entertainment System: A Directory on a few hour-long ferry crossings of Puget Sound between Seattle and Bremerton, Washington. From 1981-1983, Nintendo of America, which had recently relocated to the Seattle area from Manhattan, saw sales of its arcade game Donkey Kong soar. Weekly, thousands of arcade cabinets left the Port of Seattle bound for, say, a mall in Joliet, a bowling alley in Reno, a Pizza Hut in Laramie. This stretch of time and money ultimately made way for the introduction of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), the 8-bit home video game console that revived a crashed industry. One of the first NES games to become a franchise was The Legend of Zelda, the very game that moved Martrich to ask Imaginary Libraries’ central question: could a book that only exists in a video game be gathered? Adjacent to Marianne Moore’s imaginary gardens with real toads in them, Martrich’s imaginary libraries feature apparitions, materializations, presences, absences, simulations of simulations—an intricate symbiosis that’s as real as the reader thinks it to be, an ontology that reveals itself as does the progression system of an exploration-based video game: find something to advance. Or, per Imaginary Libraries’ guiding mantra, the holes will guide you. At a time when attempts to dismantle the imagination, libraries, and play are at fever pitch, it brings me great joy to dwell in the glint and expanse that Martrich’s directory gathers."
—Shannon Tharp
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"A knuckle bone along the spine. A faceless pixilated Mennonite. A jumbling of rectangles. A ball of light in one's hands. When conducting a séance the placement of the sitters is essential; their energetic arrangement in space around a table creates the atmospheric conditions / force field which facilitates the manifestation of psychic phenomena. Books placed together create a vibration or frequency that attracts visitors to them; sometimes entities operating on other planes. The levels of initiation one must attain before accessing the library. Imaginary authorless tomes; what formulas exist in such books of magic? Perhaps a new spell for invisibility." —Whit Griffith
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Imaginary Libraries of the Nintendo Entertainment System: A Directory is a concise study/reference work related to in-game libraries, that is, libraries depicted in video games.
While in-game libraries aren't a new subject, this little book takes a different approach; notably given its focus on the Nintendo Entertainment System, and a consequent time period: 1986-1994 (the North American release of the NES until the issuing of its final game). The consideration of such libraries is rendered via a bibliographical hauntology, which takes as its forebears Tan Lin's indexing and bibliographical projects, Rachel Blau DuPlessis' drafts related to ghostly or incomplete books, Alec Finlay's anthology The Libraries of Thought and Imagination, and Craig Dworkin's The Perverse Library.
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In the latter, Dworkin writes that "libraries are defined not by what they have on their shelves, but by what they exclude from them" as real and imaginary titles and categories proliferate in the inherent gaps of any collection. Dworkin's libraries are essentially imaginary constructs, housing a matryoshka-like spiraling of material and immaterial "books." Imaginary Libraries of the Nintendo Entertainment System posits that libraries portrayed in NES games are emblematic of such an arrangement, especially in the context of their intrinsic crudeness and anonymity.
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The work concludes with a directory, which lists NES games that depict libraries, with instructions for how to "access" them. The work is complemented with screen captures of the libraries and illustrations by Eddie Hopely.
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