Stuart Kelly

A great tour-de-force by Kelly as he spans millennia covering writers, famous and obscure, throughout history that have had their writing misplaced or destroyed for whatever reason.

Homer, Aristophanes, Philip K. Dick and Jane Austen are all namechecked and I recommend keeping a dictionary handy while reading this as I have never come across so many words new to me before. Of course, all these new words were promptly forgotten and sadly I am no more intelligent than when I first picked up show more this book.

I read the second edition which provides us with the bonus information around how "The Book of Lost Books" almost became a lost book itself. show less

A survey of lost manuscripts, destroyed unique copies, death-interrupted masterpieces, rejected commissions, and otherwise unreadable titles, from unknown precursors of Gilgamesh to Georges Perec's unfinished 53 Days. I suppose the most horrifying chapter is on Carlyle's History of the French Revolution, whose manuscript was destroyed by John Stuart Mills's maid. Kelly almost puts you in the room when Mills makes his "ashen-faced and barely comprehensible" confession. Before then, you meet show more Dante, Chaucer, and Villon; Donne and Jonson, Sterne and Goethe, Flaubert and the detestable Gogol; and the Twentieth Century is not neglected, in spite of the advent of photocopy machines. show less

Beginning at the very beginning of the written word, the missing parchments or symbols that first told a story from one human to another, and finishing with missing works from Sylvia Plath and George Perec, this is a book of missing literature. Some of the works were actually completed, then stolen, lost or burned. Other novels or epic poems were begun then left unfinished, while many others were essentially rumors, just talked about by the intended authors (Milton seems to have enjoyed show more claiming the vocation of poet more than producing the work) but the proposed themes never appeared.
I can't imagine how difficult it would be to research books that haven't existed in hundreds of years, or even thousands, so Stuart has done something most people wouldn't attempt. The chapters are short but informative, giving the reader reasons why the author was important (or not), his or her status or situation and why the work is lost. show less

Full marks for research, but at times I felt that his treatment of "lost" wobbled a bit. The core meaning, of course, is that completed manuscripts have gone missing, and vanished from history. But he also includes books never written or started but never finished, which opens the range of possible entries nigh infinite. These latter are usually of less interest than the former, but presumably more accessible as subject matter, and thus forms the bulk of the text. All very interesting, but show more in truth my attention began to wane as we read of yet another writer's schoolboy scribblings that have not been preserved, or a sketched opus that never got written. Fewer entries, but more in-depth treatment of significant lacunae in the written record, would have perhaps been a better approach. show less