The Top 10 Books Lost to Time

Great written works from authors such as Shakespeare and Jane Austen that you'll never have a chance to read

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National library Vienna Some of the greatest writers in history have had works lost over time.

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    1. Homer’s Margites

    Before the Iliad and the Odyssey, there was the Margites. Little is known about the plot of the comedic epic poem—Homer’s first work—written around 700 B.C. But a few surviving lines, woven into other works, describe the poem’s foolish hero, Margites.

    “He knew many things, but all badly” (from Plato’s Alcibiades). “The gods taught him neither to dig nor to plough, nor any other skill; he failed in every craft” (from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics).

    It is unfortunate that no copy of Margites exists because Aristotle held it in high acclaim. In his On the Art of Poetry, he wrote, “[Homer] was the first to indicate the forms that comedy was to assume, for his Margites bears the same relationship to comedies as his Iliad and Odyssey bear to our tragedies.”

    2. Lost Books of the Bible

    There are 24 books in the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh—and depending upon the denomination, between 66 and 84 more books in Christian Bibles, divided between the Old and New Testaments.

    Missing from these pages of scripture are what have become known as the “lost books” of the Bible. Sometimes the term is used to describe ancient Jewish and Christian writings that were tossed out of the biblical canon. But other books are lost in the true sense of the word. We only know that they existed because they are referenced by name in other books of the Bible.

    The Book of Numbers, for instance, mentions the “Book of the Battles of Yahweh,” for which no copy survives. Similarly, the First and Second Book of Kings and the First and Second Book of Chronicles names a “Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel” and a “Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah.” There are over 20 titles for which the text is missing.

    Some of the quotations mentioning the lost books provide clues to their content. The “Book in Seven Parts,” for example, likely told readers about the cities that would be divided among the Israelites.

    3. William Shakespeare’s Cardenio

    Cardenio has been called the Holy Grail of Shakespeare enthusiasts. There is evidence that Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, performed the play for King James I in May 1613—and that Shakespeare and John Fletcher, his collaborator for Henry VIII and Two Noble Kinsmen, wrote it. But the play itself is nowhere to be found.

    And what a shame! From the title, scholars infer that the plot had something to do with a scene in Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote involving a character named Cardenio. (A translation of Don Quixote was published in 1612 and would have been available to Shakespeare.)

    “Never mind that we would have an entirely new play by Shakespeare to watch, the work would be a direct link between the founder of the modern novel and the greatest playwright of all time, a connection between the Spanish and British literary traditions at their sources, and a meeting of the grandest expressions of competing colonial powers,” mused novelist Stephen Marche in the Wall Street Journal in 2009. “If ‘Cardenio’ existed, it would redefine the concept of comparative literature.”


    1. Homer’s Margites

    Before the Iliad and the Odyssey, there was the Margites. Little is known about the plot of the comedic epic poem—Homer’s first work—written around 700 B.C. But a few surviving lines, woven into other works, describe the poem’s foolish hero, Margites.

    “He knew many things, but all badly” (from Plato’s Alcibiades). “The gods taught him neither to dig nor to plough, nor any other skill; he failed in every craft” (from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics).

    It is unfortunate that no copy of Margites exists because Aristotle held it in high acclaim. In his On the Art of Poetry, he wrote, “[Homer] was the first to indicate the forms that comedy was to assume, for his Margites bears the same relationship to comedies as his Iliad and Odyssey bear to our tragedies.”

    2. Lost Books of the Bible

    There are 24 books in the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh—and depending upon the denomination, between 66 and 84 more books in Christian Bibles, divided between the Old and New Testaments.

    Missing from these pages of scripture are what have become known as the “lost books” of the Bible. Sometimes the term is used to describe ancient Jewish and Christian writings that were tossed out of the biblical canon. But other books are lost in the true sense of the word. We only know that they existed because they are referenced by name in other books of the Bible.

    The Book of Numbers, for instance, mentions the “Book of the Battles of Yahweh,” for which no copy survives. Similarly, the First and Second Book of Kings and the First and Second Book of Chronicles names a “Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel” and a “Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah.” There are over 20 titles for which the text is missing.

    Some of the quotations mentioning the lost books provide clues to their content. The “Book in Seven Parts,” for example, likely told readers about the cities that would be divided among the Israelites.

    3. William Shakespeare’s Cardenio

    Cardenio has been called the Holy Grail of Shakespeare enthusiasts. There is evidence that Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, performed the play for King James I in May 1613—and that Shakespeare and John Fletcher, his collaborator for Henry VIII and Two Noble Kinsmen, wrote it. But the play itself is nowhere to be found.

    And what a shame! From the title, scholars infer that the plot had something to do with a scene in Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote involving a character named Cardenio. (A translation of Don Quixote was published in 1612 and would have been available to Shakespeare.)

    “Never mind that we would have an entirely new play by Shakespeare to watch, the work would be a direct link between the founder of the modern novel and the greatest playwright of all time, a connection between the Spanish and British literary traditions at their sources, and a meeting of the grandest expressions of competing colonial powers,” mused novelist Stephen Marche in the Wall Street Journal in 2009. “If ‘Cardenio’ existed, it would redefine the concept of comparative literature.”

    4. Inventio Fortunata

    In the 14th century, a Franciscan monk from Oxford, whose name is unknown, traveled the North Atlantic. He described the geography of the Arctic, including what he presumed was the North Pole, in a book called Inventio Fortunata, or “The Discovery of the Fortunate Islands.” He gave King Edward III a copy of his travelogue around 1360, and some say an additional five copies floated around Europe before the book was lost.

    What followed next was a game of telephone that stretched across centuries. In 1364, another Franciscan described the contents of Inventio Fortunata to Flemish author Jacob Cnoyen, who, in turn, published a summary in his own book, Itinerarium.

    Unfortunately, Itinerarium also went missing—but not before Gerard Mercator, one of the most prestigious cartographers of the 16th century, read it.

    Mercator, writing to an English scientist named John Dee in 1577, cribbed word for word from Itinerarium’s description of the North Pole: “In the midst of the four countries is a Whirl-pool, into which there empty these four indrawing Seas which divide the North. And the water rushes round and descends into the Earth just as if one were pouring it through a filter funnel. It is four degrees wide on every side of the Pole, that is to say eight degrees altogether. Except that right under the Pole there lies a bare Rock in the midst of the Sea. Its circumference is almost 33 French miles, and it is all of magnetic Stone.”

    When Mercator published a world map in 1569, he used this description as the source for his illustration of the Arctic—based upon the third-hand summary of a lost book written by an unknown monk 200 years earlier.

    5. Jane Austen’s Sanditon

    When Jane Austen died on July 18, 1817, at the age of 42, she left behind 11 chapters of an unfinished novel that “would tantalize posterity,” as Time magazine reported in 1975. In it, protagonist Charlotte Heywood visits the seaside town of Sanditon as it is being built into a resort. Austen sets the scene, develops some characters and themes, and then, just as the plot seems to take off, it abruptly ends.

    Several writers have sought to finish the “lost” ending to Sanditon in Austen’s style, including Anne Telscombe, an Australian-born novelist. But if “Janeites take their author like warm milk at bedtime,” then Telscombe’s book, according to a review in Time magazine, is “watery milk.”

    6. Herman Melville’s The Isle of the Cross

    On a trip to Nantucket in July 1852, Herman Melville was told the tragic story of Agatha Hatch— the daughter of a lighthouse keeper who saved a shipwrecked sailor named James Robertson, then married him, only later to be abandoned by him.

    The tale would serve as inspiration for a manuscript titled The Isle of the Cross, which Melville presented to Harper & Brothers in 1853. But the publisher, for reasons unknown, turned it down. And no copy of the manuscript has ever been found. In an essay in a 1990 issue of the journal American Literature, Hershel Parker, a biographer of Melville’s, claims, “The most plausible suggestion is that the Harpers feared that their firm would be criminally liable if anyone recognized the originals of the characters in The Isle of the Cross.”

    7. Thomas Hardy’s The Poor Man and the Lady

    This first novel by Thomas Hardy was about the on-again, off-again relationship between a son of peasants and the daughter of a local squire in Dorsetshire, England. That much is made clear in the only existing plot summary of the book—a transcribed conversation between Hardy and English poet Edmund Gosse from April 1915. But Hardy, who had written the story nearly 50 years earlier, could not recall many details, including whether or not the two characters ultimately ended up together.

    What we do know from the transcript is that in the late 1860s, Hardy considered the work the most original thing that he had written—and, by then, he had written many of the poems he would end up publishing decades later. But publishers rejected his manuscript. Some scholars think that Hardy incorporated pieces of it into his later works, including the poem “A Poor Man and a Lady,” the novella An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress and his first published novel, Desperate Remedies.

    8. First draft of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

    It is rumored that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a 30,000-word draft of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in just three days. But when his wife, Fanny Stevenson, read it, she criticized the text, saying that it would work better if the plot served as a moral allegory.

    What happened next is up for debate. One version of the story is that Stevenson, not taking the criticism so well, tossed his manuscript into a fireplace. But in 2000, some 115 years after The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was written, a letter from Fanny Stevenson to W. E. Henley (a peg-legged poet, who inspired Treasure Island’s Long John Silver character), turned up in the attic of one of Henley’s descendants. In the letter, dated 1885, Fanny called the first draft “a quire full of utter nonsense,” and said, “I shall burn it after I show it to you.” Whether she actually did or not is unknown. Either way, the first draft no longer exists. Stevenson rewrote the story, and readers will never know the differences between his original vision and the now classic tale.

    9. Ernest Hemingway’s World War I novel

    In 1922, Hadley Hemingway, the first of Ernest Hemingway’s four wives, put the longhand originals of several of her husband’s short stories and a partial novel in a suitcase. She left Paris on a train and met Ernest in Lausanne, Switzerland. But, en route, the suitcase and its priceless cargo were stolen.

    It was not until later that Hemingway would comment on the gravity of the loss. He once said that he would have opted for surgery if he knew it could erase the memory. And according to Stuart Kelly, author of The Book of Lost Books, Hemingway was known to claim, usually after a drink or two, that the debacle led to his divorcing Hadley.

    He never attempted to rewrite the lost works, including the novel, which was based upon his own experiences in World War I. But Kelly argues that was for the better: “Had he spent the next ten years trying to perfect his immature jottings, we might never have seen the novels of which he was capable.”

    10. Sylvia Plath’s Double Exposure

    In 1962, Sylvia Plath started work on a new novel that she planned to title either Double Exposure or Double Take. She had 130 pages written, but the book was incomplete when she committed suicide on February 11, 1963.

    After her death, her estranged husband, poet Ted Hughes, gained control of her estate and unpublished works. When asked about the novel in a 1995 interview with the Paris Review, Hughes said, “Well, what I was aware of was a fragment of a novel about seventy pages. Her mother said she saw a whole novel, but I never knew about it. What I was aware of was sixty, seventy pages, which disappeared. And to tell you the truth, I always assumed her mother took them all, on one of her visits.”

    Only one literary critic, Judith Kroll, saw an outline for Double Exposure, and she claimed that it had to do with a husband, wife and mistress. Hughes and Plath had a troubled relationship, and so it is thought that it might have been partly autobiographical. Hughes did burn one of Plath’s journals, written in her last months, saying, in the Paris Review interview, that it was too sad for her children to see.


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    Surely,the poems of Sapho should lead the list. The fragments extent are too enticing not to want to savor her genius in full.

    Posted by Robert Nicklas on November 25,2011 | 10:03 AM

    Cicero's _Hortensius_.

    Posted by David Gore on November 14,2011 | 02:51 PM

    So much has been lost, but there are two bodies of work that I particularly mourn.

    The first are the letters of Jane Austen. She wrote many letters to her sisters and brothers over the course of her lifetime. Her sister Cassandra preserved some, but destroyed many of them; presumably, she burned the ones that were too personal, which are exactly the ones we would want to see. Also, her letters to her brother, Admiral Francis Austen, were burned by his daughter after his death.

    The other loss are the manuscripts in the English monastic libraries, that were lost after the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII. The people of Tudor times were not a sentimental bunch; they saw little value in those old scribbling, and used the manuscripts to light fires or cover jars. Practically the entire canon of Anglo-Saxon poetry is contained in exactly four manuscripts; one can only imagine how many poems of the caliber of "Beowulf" were lost.

    Posted by Fred Butzen on November 3,2011 | 06:56 AM

    Woo boy, this is a topic I can go very long on.

    Another tantalizing lost book in the vein of the Inventio Fortunata is the work On the Ocean, by Pytheus, a Greek who decided to go exploring around 330 BC; he apparently visited Britain, islands to the north, and possibly Iceland (which he called Ultima Thule). Lots of Greek & Roman historical works to consider, including the rest of Livy's monumental history (only 30 of 135 books survive), the missing portions of Tacitus and Polybius' Roman Histories, the historical works of the Emperor Claudius (especially his histories of Carthage and of the Etruscans), and Timeaus' History of Sicily. In stage, only a bare few of the plays of Euripides, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, and Menander have come down to us, and the works of many other playwrights survive only in their names. For poetry, most of the Epic Cycle (of which Homer's works were but a part) have been lost, as well as the equally epic poetry of the Romans Ennius and Naevius.

    Posted by detroyes on November 2,2011 | 12:06 AM

    Also the writings that have been edited and censored after the death of the writer, like Queen Victoria's diaries.

    Posted by Barbara Stoffa on October 27,2011 | 12:23 PM

    Bryan Langley makes a good point about the Torah, and to say that certain writings were "were tossed out of the biblical canon" is wholly inaccurate. Those supposed "lost books" such as Tobit or the Maccabees, or the "Gospel of Thomas" were never part of the Biblical canon. No synagogue or orthodox Christian group ever accepted any of them as Scripture.

    Posted by Charles Wiggins on October 25,2011 | 09:59 AM

    I would add the log to Francis Drake's very successful round the world voyage - which he completed in 1578-80 being one of the earliest to do so (after Magellan's crew).

    Supposedly he sought to find the straits of Anian or the Northwest Passage, and may have gone as far as the coast of Alaska.

    Posted by peter Kratoska on October 18,2011 | 04:10 PM

    I think the purpose of the 1962 Sylvia Plath was to show that something so new, under 50 years old, can be lost forever. With our current technologies and the internet, it's a wonder if any pieces of literature ever have to be considered lost again.

    Posted by Joan B. on October 12,2011 | 04:49 PM

    Another great loss was Marcus Goodrich's sequel to Delilah, supposedly voluminous but lost with the author's death.

    Posted by Nortley on October 6,2011 | 11:01 PM

    There are many libraries of music for which we have lists, but the libraries were dispersed and lost, or burned in fire or war, etc. There is Christopher Columbus' library, a large number of Renaissance MSS lost in the Franco Prussian war. I also think of the Great Library & Mouseion in Alexandria, Egypt which was burned in 48 B.C.E. when Julius Caesar set it on fire apparently by mistake when he burned the fleets of the Ptomleys. This was the first major library that we know of. Others in Turkey, Timbuktu, etc. Thanks for the engaging list. Here in the US it feels like no one reads anymore.

    Posted by David Fillingham on October 6,2011 | 02:52 PM

    Wow, this is so depressing! But, I remain hopeful that some of these books will pop up somewhere. We must remain hopeful.

    Posted by Kathleen on October 6,2011 | 02:14 PM

    Also lost: Bronson Alcott's journals from his failed Fruitlands communal living experiment (daughter Louisa May was just a child during that eight-month period) - the journals were left behind in the coach when the family abandoned the experiment. And (I could sob over this one) Scott Joplin's Guest of Honor, an opera honoring Theodore Roosevelt's invitation for Book T. Washington to visit the White House (back when the only black Americans could enter the White House only through the service entrance).

    Posted by Jean Reynolds on October 6,2011 | 02:04 PM

    Just because the Jewish historical books are missing doesn't make them "Lost Books of the Bible." Yes, it's a shame they don't survive, but books from that culture and that era weren't included in the Torah for a reason -- they weren't recognize as divinely inspired.

    Posted by Bryan Langley on October 4,2011 | 01:31 AM

    Almost lost The Confederacy of Dunces. College 20th Century Fiction Literature has been saved

    Posted by PB on October 4,2011 | 12:00 PM

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