News:

And we're back!

Main Menu

Lost books

Started by celedhring, April 22, 2024, 04:39:31 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

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.
Women want me. Men want to be with me.

Sheilbh

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

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 :lol:
Let's bomb Russia!

Sophie Scholl

The Enheduanna. Inanna's Truth must be fully recovered and restored.  :pope:
"Everything that brought you here -- all the things that made you a prisoner of past sins -- they are gone. Forever and for good. So let the past go... and live."

"Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don't dare express themselves as we did."

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.
I've given it serious thought. I must scorn the ways of my family, and seek a Japanese woman to yield me my progeny. He shall live in the lands of the east, and be well tutored in his sacred trust to weave the best traditions of Japan and the Sacred South together, until such time as he (or, indeed his house, which will periodically require infusion of both Southern and Japanese bloodlines of note) can deliver to the South it's independence, either in this world or in space.  -Lettow April of 2011

Raz is right. -MadImmortalMan March of 2017

Maladict

Quote from: crazy canuck on April 22, 2024, 11:49:22 AMI 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.
In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock

Valmy

The Book of Thoth, being able to talk to animals could be useful.
Quote"This is a Russian warship. I propose you lay down arms and surrender to avoid bloodshed & unnecessary victims. Otherwise, you'll be bombed."

Zmiinyi defenders: "Russian warship, go fuck yourself."

celedhring

Quote from: Savonarola on April 22, 2024, 02:38:13 PMAristotle'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

"I've never been quite sure what the point of a eunuch is, if truth be told. It seems to me they're only men with the useful bits cut off."
I drank because I wanted to drown my sorrows, but now the damned things have learned to swim.

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!....
The future is all around us, waiting, in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of that future or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain.   -G'Kar

Bayraktar!

Tonitrus

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

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