Mindell Dubansky’s romance with fake books began nearly two decades ago at a Manhattan flea market, where she picked up a small volume carved from a piece of coal and bearing the name of a young man who had died in a mining accident in 1897.

“An electric charge of grief went through my entire body,” Ms. Dubansky, the longtime preservation librarian at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, recalled.

A light bulb also went off in her head. Sensing an unexplored territory, Ms. Dubansky set out to map the contours of the world of fake books, eventually amassing about 600 made from stone, wax, straw, wood, soap, plastic, glass and other materials. She even coined a term for them: “blooks,” short for “book-look.”