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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Some of the greatest writers in history have had works lost over time. (Guntmar Fritz / Corbis)

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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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Comments (73)

I love history because its fun to learn bout America and other parts of the world. I always wanted Travel around the world to learn bout others and how they lived. I love to go to Greece, China, Africa, Austral, Brazil, Japan, and so on.

Posted by Laramie Hodges on January 7,2013 | 05:38 PM

I am surprised this article left out the Lost Works of Berosus the Chaldean priest who wrote a detailed summary of 'the history of the world' up to his day from creation onward, he is quoted quite a bit by Flavious Josephus. Finding his three books alone would be a game changer as regards ancient history, religion & science. The second (also a game changer) would be the 7 lost works of Archimedes. such a tragedy to lose such important works more so than losing relatively recent novels. really the writer of this article really wouldnt have to look far for very very significant lost works, I have mentioned but a few, im sure others opinions will differ as well. :)

Posted by olaf borgstrom on July 10,2012 | 12:08 AM

Plutarch and Tacitus both mention "The Acts of Pontus Pilate" which agrees with the Gospel accounts of Christ's crucifixion, and is Tacitus's source for his account of it.

Posted by sean on May 26,2012 | 08:24 PM

Where can i find info: The Works of Shakspere-notes-Inperial Edition-edition by Charles Knight- 1623 First Folio with 36 play. The Glots Theater,backside 1593 -London,virtue,limted.290 city road.

Posted by Tom on March 3,2012 | 10:00 PM

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

We should not forget that Margot Frank also wrote a diary, one that she shared with her sister Anne Frank, but which was lost when the Nazis and their Dutch helpers stole all of the family's possessions.

Posted by Ralph Melnick on October 3,2011 | 02:55 PM

how about necrominion

Posted by michael seabrook on October 3,2011 | 10:47 AM

Gogol's second tome of "Dead souls"... tossed into the fireplace by the author in a moment of madness...

Posted by tetjana on October 1,2011 | 09:40 PM

And the legendary second book of the Comedy of Aristotle? Many (but ambigous) traces in antiquity; then U.Eco wrote about it the interesting fiction novel "The Name of the Rose".

Posted by Paolo on October 1,2011 | 08:07 PM

Interesting list, though my first thought was - what about Sappho!?

Posted by joey on October 1,2011 | 01:32 PM

The list fudges the distinction between "lost"and "unfinished," which are two very different things (unless the unfinished work is genuinely lost). Most of the works on this list are in the much more comprehensive listing of lost works at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_work

The Wikipedia list includes ancient scientific and philosophical works, as well as diaries and the like. It's still pretty Eurocentric but does mention a number of texts from other cultures. See especially the list of lost collections (including the entire library of Alexandria) toward the end of the entry.

Posted by Donald F. Larsson on October 1,2011 | 10:08 AM

What about all the literature lost in the burning of Aleandria? Surely this should have been 1. on your list?

Posted by kung on October 1,2011 | 06:05 AM

I don't think it's fair to say that a novel from 1962 is a "disapointing" contribution. I loved this list. It's just a quick list of the more well known authors and I found it very interesting!

Posted by Christa Carlson on September 29,2011 | 03:43 PM

Never written or not completed does not constitute "lost".

Posted by fred on September 29,2011 | 08:49 AM

Neat Post. You never know what might yet show up in the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum. My best friend just found a letter of Victor Hugo's in a collection of Hugo's works at his bookstore.

http://tipsybooks.blogspot.com/2011/09/original-handwritten-letter-from-victor.html

Posted by Ariel Segal on September 28,2011 | 03:46 PM

Austen's SANDITON isn't "lost," it's "unfinished." Just like Charlotte Brontë's EMMA.

Posted by Mike Ehling on September 28,2011 | 03:18 PM

What about the lost works of Sappho? Certainly there must have been titles from the burning of the library at Alexandria. I have often wondered about these. Does anyone know anything about them?

Posted by skyreader7 on September 28,2011 | 11:59 AM

On a personal level I think the loss of the first 13 books of Ammianus Marcellinus' 'Res Gestae' or 'Roman History', written around 395AD (only books 14 to 31 now survive), is beyond all other losses as they would have given us an insight into a period of Roman history that is now sadly lacking. It would have given us perhaps a more unbiased picture of Constantine the Great and also shed more light on Jesus Christ.

Posted by Adrian Coombs-Hoar on September 28,2011 | 11:06 AM

Umm ... the current Christian canon is 66 to 84 books which include the Tanakh rather than "more" [presumably than the Tanakh].

I would think this would be an easy fact to check. If this bit of information is incorrect what other bits could be?

Posted by BJ on September 28,2011 | 08:52 AM

Lets face it, Evan & Katie, Euro-American literature is vastly more significant for our world culture than other branches of the literary tree.

Posted by Steve M on September 28,2011 | 08:13 AM

Two words: Prometheus Unbound

Posted by Jake on September 27,2011 | 12:58 AM

What about the Epic Cycle besides the Iliad and Odyssey?

Posted by Beforrester on September 27,2011 | 12:47 AM

Richard Burton's 'The Scented Garden' thought to be his "magnum opus" was burned by his widow for being too licentious for Victorian prudity...what a tragedy!

Posted by Ruby Con on September 27,2011 | 12:07 AM

No Sappho?

Posted by Adam Harvey on September 27,2011 | 11:30 PM

evan and katie...i couldn't agree more...missing vedas; the missing (intentionally destroyed) books of the maya, inca and other south american cultures; the destroyed wisdom of the library at alexandria...totally out weigh austen, hemingway and plath...sigh.

Posted by undrgrndgirl on September 27,2011 | 11:11 PM

Let us not forget the lost second part of Aristotle's Poetics, the part on comedy. Umberto Eco used it as the MacGuffin in The Name of the Rose.

Posted by Michael Kinyon on September 27,2011 | 08:42 PM

Don't forget "The Trial" by Franz Kafka. The story was unfinished at the time of his death. A man was arrested and stood trial. Throughout the book, the man did not know what crime he committed? If it was ever to be revealed by the end of the book remains unknown.

Posted by Sarah on September 27,2011 | 04:50 PM

This is the best you could come up with?

Posted by Adam Stanhope on September 27,2011 | 03:58 PM

What about the last half to Charles Dicken's last book?? 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood'. He passed away.. before finishing the last half of the novel. I must agree with the other comments. This was a sadly thought out chick lit list. Not a top ten books by any estimation.

Posted by Cherei on September 27,2011 | 03:30 PM

Seconding the preceding, the number of lost works from the classical world alone makes a library of vanished Jane Austen insignificant. That so much knowledge, insight and beauty has been likely irretrievably lost to the depredations of time and man--particularly those men for whom knowledge is either meaningless or the exclusive property of their deity of choice--is one of the most tragic things we've experienced as a civilization.

Posted by DC reader on September 27,2011 | 03:30 PM

Aristotle's lost treatise on comedy?

Posted by Lyle Rexer on September 27,2011 | 03:06 PM

Sadly neglects books 2 and 3 of Gogol's Dead Souls

Posted by Tim Brink on September 27,2011 | 01:28 PM

#1 lost book: Archimedes' Method. We had to wait another 500 years for calculus to be reinvented after a monk turned the last surviving copy into yet another Bible a millenia later...

Posted by Kimmo on September 27,2011 | 12:20 PM

The first lost book of the Bible should be "Q." Matthew and Luke used Mark, and a mystery document known only as "Q" as their primary sources. Works they know came from Q are "The Lord's prayer"(our father) and the Beatitudes. That's a really sad list of Lost books of the Bible, it could have been soooooo much more.

Posted by Adam on September 27,2011 | 11:55 AM

This really is a disappointing list. How about the lost works of Julius Caesar? Or Sulla's Memoirs? The number of lost classical works alone seem like they should exclude any modern works from Plath or Hemingway. And, or course, there's a whole world of non-western works.

Posted by John de Michele on September 27,2011 | 11:44 AM

Three important Spanish fencing books from the SXV-XVI: In 1473, Pedro de la Torre published "El Manejo de las Armas de Combate" (The Management of Combat Arms). Jaume Pons of Mallorca, published in Perpignan another treaty, in 1474, and Francisco Román, master of arms of Charles I, published his treatise in Seville in 1532. All of them lost.

Posted by Manuel on September 27,2011 | 08:59 AM

What a great idea for a list! No accounting would be complete or could be wholly inclusive, of course. A list of what we've "lost" is really a trigger for us to contemplate what we possess and value.

Posted by Jonathan Salem Baskin on September 27,2011 | 07:16 AM

What about all the Mayan writings that were destroyed?

Posted by Thadd on September 27,2011 | 06:53 AM

Didn't the work of Diogenes disappear when the Alexandria library burned?

Posted by svh on September 27,2011 | 03:35 AM

Katie & Evan -- We assume the mists of time will erase many books. A novel of as recent time as 1962 disappearing has an unexpected plangency. And the examples for Homer, the Bible and Shakespeare are stark reminders that we think we know it all in our potted Great Literature cursory knowledge, but we're wrong: as trenchant a criticism on standard Lit courses as any one you can muster on the grounds of narrowness of world scope.

Posted by VM on September 26,2011 | 01:45 AM

What about the poetry of Sappho? Which was systematically destroyed by the Catholic Church and now we only have fragments of it.

Posted by Jen on September 26,2011 | 08:58 PM

What about the Louis-Ferdinand Céline's books lost in 1944 ?

Posted by LB on September 26,2011 | 08:54 PM

Surprised the lost second part of Aristotle's "Poetics" didn't make the list.

Posted by Charles on September 26,2011 | 07:53 PM

1. None of Homer's works were written. They arose out of an oral tradition, with no one author. Bards learned and recited them from memory. The Illiad and Odyssey were not documented until the classical period. So the Margites can be called a lost work, but not a lost book.

Posted by Zezebelle on September 26,2011 | 07:13 PM

why waste space on the list with jane austen?

Posted by jamesjim on September 26,2011 | 06:48 PM

Really a bizarre list. The loss of Margites will be an ethernal sorrow, and in comparison, the loss of most of the other nine is nothing: had you forgotten them in a train, I'd not even mention it, not to bother you. And as to the bible, I'd have said, you did the right thing.

Posted by pietro on September 26,2011 | 06:26 PM

What about all the Mayan codices burned by the Spanish? Only a handful have survived out of hundreds or thousands destroyed!

Posted by b on September 26,2011 | 03:45 PM

This article illustrates the need for an orphaned works act so that many of the out of print works as well as film and audio are not lost. This is just a few of the thousands of works that are lost and the number is increasing each year.

Posted by Dan Perry on September 26,2011 | 03:44 PM

The lost second part of Aristotle's Poetics, which added comedy to the first part's analysis of tragedy.

Posted by Dean on September 26,2011 | 03:09 PM

I was going to suggest the first draft of Juneteenth, but a quick web search shows maybe it wasn't really lost after all. Anyway, great list!

Posted by Ian on September 26,2011 | 02:50 PM

Yes, this list is very strange. The Mayans hand-printed thousands upon thousands of books, but a Spanish priest burned every single copy of their work he could get ahold of. These days, only 4 copies of Mayan books are known to exist.

Alexandria, anyone? Anyone? Mankind lost the wisdom on the ancients in the that fire. It seems to me that we don't know enough to know exactly what we have lost to time.

A Sylvia Plath novel? Really? sheesh.

Posted by Paul R. on September 26,2011 | 02:47 PM

Would love to see a companion piece about works thought lost but later recovered.

Posted by Gregory on September 26,2011 | 02:12 PM

Why does this author assume that, because a lost book is referenced in the Bible, it's therefore a lost book *of* the Bible? Also, the Christian Bible does not have 66 to 84 *more* books than the Hebrew Bible, but simply 66 to 84 books (whether a Protestant or an Eastern Orthodox Bible). Perhaps in the future someone with at least a passing knowledge of Judeo-Christian religion could look over such a list item before publication.

Posted by Charles S. Geiger on September 26,2011 | 09:17 AM

Mostly, a disappointing list with a pretentious title. Nothing ancient from China, Japan, or India makes the list. The list is heavily skewed towards English writers. Surely, writers in other major languages have something to say too.

Posted by Akhlesh Lakhtakia on September 26,2011 | 05:17 AM

Why can't this generation come up with its own brilliant works? Today we have such an advanced ability to distribute information, and yet the only new thing we can come up with is Spiderman 4. Ten thousand years of human learning and innovation and that is the pinnacle? Sigh...

Posted by zrzzz on September 25,2011 | 12:51 AM

"Homer’s first work—written around 700 B.C." Written?

Posted by Leslie Katz on September 25,2011 | 03:46 PM

I can scarcely imagine a greater loss than the ships' logs of the fleet of Admiral Zheng He, who explored the south Pacific and Indian oceans in the early 1400's. He is known to have reached Australia and East Africa in ships that dwarfed those of Columbus. The log books were ordered destroyed by a later Ming Emperor who decided that China should turn inward.

Posted by Curtis Mobley on September 23,2011 | 01:59 AM

I like the list. Would loved to had read most.

Posted by onnie on September 22,2011 | 07:14 PM

What a curious and disappointing list. We would have expected the Smithsonian to better represent the contributions (even the "lost" contributions) of non-Euro-American authors. A novel from 1962 made the list? What about the redacted or lost portions of the Vedas? I wonder if people 3,000 years in the future will mourn the loss of another Jane Austen novel.

Posted by Evan & Katie on September 20,2011 | 09:27 PM

How about the 123 lost plays of Sophocles? There are only 7 extant but imagine if there were plays as powerful as Antigone, Oedipus, Ajax...

Posted by Bob Wilson on September 20,2011 | 02:07 PM



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