The Book of Lost Books

Over the Thanksgiving break, I was talking with Jenn and my mother when the subject of lost books came up: Hemingway’s stolen suitcase full of short stories, Bruno Schulz’s novel The Messiah, manuscripts lost to deliberate fire (Sir Richard Burton, Nikolai Gogol) or to accidental fire (Malcolm Lowry, the library at Alexandria).

It occurred to me that a collection of these stories might be interesting to read and to write. I even thought of an appropriate title: The Book of Lost Books. (In my literal-minded way, I like books with concrete titles like The Tin Drum, or that baldly state what they are: The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, The Book of Daniel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.)

Before I started working, though, I thought it best to check whether anyone else had been there first. And so I found not only that the book has been done, but under the very same title. The Book of Lost Books by Stuart Kelly was published in 2006, and I must admit that Kelly did a nice job.

I don’t see a chapter on Malcolm Lowry, though, and the loss of his enormous “bolus,” The Voyage That Never Ends. In his introduction, Kelly does mention that the original manuscript of Lowry’s Ultramarine was stolen from his publisher’s car and that the book “had to be recreated from what was left in Lowry’s wastebasket.”