Stuart Kelly
The Book of Lost Books
An incomplete History of all the
Great Books you will never read
Book Description: Loss is not an anomaly, or a deviation, or an exception. It is the norm. It is the rule. It is inescapable.
The Book of Lost Books is an alternative history of literature, which begins with the earliest hominids and, ranging through from Homer and the Bible to Sylvia Plath and William Burroughs, ends with the entropic heat-death of the Universe. Each of the entries describes and discusses a work of literature, which, for various reasons, cannot be read: it may have been destroyed, or left incomplete at the author’s death, or may never even have been started.
Books are destroyed by fire, water, internment, apathy, madness, a crocodile and prejudice. There are mathematical puzzles and magic symbols, quack prophets and inveterate riddlers, a novel written entirely without the letter ‘e’ and an encyclopaedia that was logically impossible to write. Despite the undercurrents of loss, cultural extinction and the ubiquity of Death, it is a celebratory book, revelling in the oddities and haphazard chances that comprise the history of writing. For the Lost Book, like the person you never dared ask to the dance, becomes infinitely more alluring simply because it remains perfect only in the imagination…
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