There is a wonderful book by Stuart Kelly that is exactly the kind of book I love - it’s about lost books. It is unironically entitled “The Book Of Lost Books”. I can’t recommend it enough. It’s perfect for summer beach reading.
This is a well-known literary category & “The Book Of Lost Books”, without being exhaustively comprehensive, does an amazing job of covering all the cases that are commonly known (like the Library of Alexandria) & a bunch I never knew about. The story of a young Ernest Hemingway losing a trunk filled with EVERYTHING HE’D EVER WRITTEN on the platform of a train station is particularly maddening. I think I get the same pleasure from this kind of story that some people get from reality TV or soap operas: cringe tension. Allegedly, his wife was to blame. Relationships are hard…
I was recently opening some boxes of books that had not been opened for a few moves. I couldn’t find “The Book Of Lost Books”. Understandable, because, it’s the kind of book I leave “around” at all times. I like to read & re-read it, so, it could easily not be in the boxes with all the other books.
But, everything is open now. It’s gone. I lost “The Book Of Lost Books”.
This pretty much sums up everything you need to know about me.