Lost books

[celedhring]

In anticipation of Book Day, a little game.

Imagine you can wave your hand and make a completely intact copy of any lost text surface. Which one would it be?

For me, it would be a compilation of all of Aristophanes' lost plays - he's my favorite Greek playwright and a huge influence in my film school years. I even have a semi-completed screenplay adapting "The Frogs".

Note that it doesn't need to be a text from Antiquity, plenty of lost books in medieval and modern times!

[The Brain]

Venerable Jorge frowns on your shenanigans.

[Sheilbh]

For thhe gossip I would like all of those diaries of writers destroyed by their executors to "protect their memory and reputation" back

The one that springs to mind, though, is Walter Benjamin's last book. He fled Paris as the Germans approached. He managed to get the Arcades Project into the hands of a friend who hid it in the National Archives. In Marseille he gave the Theses on the Philosophy of History (which I think is extraordinary and incredibly readable) to Hannah Arendt.

He then has an experience like something out of Anna Seeghers' Transit where he has the visa to go to America and the visa to get into Portugal to board an American ship but he doesn't have the right exit visa to leave France or transit papers to get through Spain so ends up having to cross the Pyrenees. He had a manuscript in his briefcase. Reportedly he was telling fellow refugees that it was more important his briefcase reached America than that he did. Having been turned back at the border with the expectation he'd be handed over to the German authorities (he always managed to keep a few days ahead), he committed suicide on the French side of the border with Spain. His briefcase disappears at that point - we have no idea what the text was or what came of it.

Edit: Three posts in and we have Venerable Jorge and hiding a text in a library - love that this thread immediately took that turn

[Sophie Scholl]

The Enheduanna. Inanna's Truth must be fully recovered and restored. 

[crazy canuck]

I am going to cheat a bit and say the complete works of Sappho

[Razgovory]

That choose-your-own-adventure book I lost in the third grade.  It was a library book and I had to pay five bucks to the school.  I'm still unhappy how that turned out.  If I get the book I could take it back and get my money.

[Maladict]

I am going to cheat a bit and say the complete works of Sappho

Yeah, I'd say some more Sappho or more Pindar.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

I wonder if the full index of the Library of Alexandria might yield something interesting.

[Savonarola]

Along Sheilbh's way of thinking, Byron's Memoirs would likely be the most entertaining.

There's probably a reason why Shakespeare's The History of Cardenio (if it ever existed) was lost.  I assume it didn't live up to his other works; but it would still be cool to have.  Aristotle's dialogues were supposed to be magnificent; and The Tragedy is so influential that I'd be curious what The Comedy said; so I'd pick one of those.

[Valmy]

The Book of Thoth, being able to talk to animals could be useful.

[celedhring]

Aristotle's dialogues were supposed to be magnificent; and The Tragedy is so influential that I'd be curious what The Comedy said; so I'd pick one of those.

Just don't lick your finger when turning the page on that one...

(how many Name of the Rose references so far?)

[garbon]

 

[Tonitrus]

I will go with a "lost" in the sense of a "never was/could have been"; Abraham Lincoln's memoirs.

[grumbler]

In that vein, Mark Twain's memoirs.  Oh, wait!....

[Tonitrus]

Mark Twain wrote enough travel journals and such, you could easily argue his entire body of work comprises a memoir. 

But I'd be seriously interested specifically in Lincoln writing his retrospective on being President during the ACW.