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Stuart Kelly

Stuart Kelly has been investigating lost books since he was 15. He studied English at Oxford and is currently a literary critic at The Scotsman on Sunday. He has written for McSweeneys, Poetry Review and Nerve and published his first collection of poems in 2004. He lives in Edinburgh.

Hilarious, insightful, endlessly fascinating, sometimes shocking - The Book of Lost Books is a wonderfully quirky but utterly romantic saga of our and Stuart Kelly’s love affair with books.

There is a theme that recurs throughout the history of recorded literature: the immortality of literature itself. In Imperial Rome, in the 30th Ode of his third book, the poet Horace wrote:

Exegi monumentum aere perennius
regalique situ pyramidum altius,
quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens
posit diruere aut innumerabilis
annorum series et fuga temporum

“I have created a monument more durable than bronze, and higher than the royal pile of the Pyramids, one that no wasting rain, nor furious North wind, nor the countless chain of years and time’s flight can destroy”. Shakespeare, some sixteen hundred years later, lauded his lover and his own poetic ability in Sonnet 20:

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Goethe, too, imagined a form of literature that partook of the eternal, in the West-Eastern Divan:

daß Dichterworte
Um der Paradieses Pforte
Immer leise klopfend schweben,
Sich erbittend ewges Leben.

“The poet’s words are always hovering around the Gates of Paradise, knocking softly, beseeching and gaining eternal life”. It’s a lovely notion, the idea that after our inevitable deaths, something as insubstantial as words might persist, and convey to the future some inkling of our cares, concerns and culture. It’s also, of course, utter baloney.

The Book of Lost Books began when I was fifteen. In the fifth form, after two glorious years purely doing academic work, it was again compulsory to do two sessions of games – and we’re not talking backgammon here – each week. There was simply no way I was returning to the Games Hall. I managed to persuade the staff that it was in everyone’s best interest if I started studying Greek. And miraculously, I was allowed to do just that. For a few years, I had been assiduously setting aside my lunch money (I was given a pound a day, and discovered that a glass of milk and a cheese roll only came to 30p), in order to satisfy an already gluttonous desire for Penguin Classics. My first stop, once the fearful physical education stricture was removed, was to James Thin’s bookshop in Edinburgh, where I bought all of Greek drama.

Or presumed that I did. Reading the introduction to the Oresteia of Aeschylus, I discovered that he had actually written seventy-odd, not seven, plays. Sophocles and Euripides were in similarly reduced circumstances. And reading the notes to Aristophanes, I came across an even more bizarre claim: “Agathon, one of the most celebrated tragedians of the day, was forty-one when this play was produced. None of his works has survived”.

I had always imagined that “Literature” was a bit like a massive library; and, with diligence and perseverance, I could read all of “Literature” just as I had read all the Mr Men books. I realised that some might be difficult to obtain, or not yet translated (I knew enough about Zola to be cross that Penguin had omitted to publish several novels, and that they couldn’t be found in Everyman, World’s Classics or any other publisher I knew of). The idea that books could just disappear seemed unthinkable, and, yet, somehow, tantalising. The germ of The Book of Lost Books began then, with note 61 to Aristophanes’ “The Poet and the Women”. How many other works of Literature were unaccounted for?

Lots. From Homer to Hemingway, Callimachus to Cervantes to Kafka: the history of literature was a history of loss. The greatest names – Dante, Shakespeare and Dickens – were as susceptible as those mired in obscurity. “Literature” was a threadbare, tattered, moth-eaten sheet, not a pristine page. I decided to do something about it.

The Book of Lost Books is the result. Unlike Borges’s Pierre Menand, I couldn’t psychically transpose myself into the minds of long-dead authors and recreate their works, so I opted, instead, for an encyclopaedia of absence, an anthology of the astray. I hope the book resembles a wake: a slightly riotous, occasionally melancholy, ultimately affirmative affair; a commodius vicus of recirculation, as James Joyce would have it, around the curious history of literature.

There are three kind of Lost Book in this book. Firstly, there are works that we know once existed, but all complete copies have been destroyed. Shakespeare’s Cardenio and Love’s Labour’s Won, Saint Paul’s other letters and Byron’s Memoirs fall into this category. The second kind of loss is the Unfinished. Austen’s Sanditon, Gogol’s Dead Souls and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales are examples of this form of un-read-ability. Finally, there is the Unstarted. Authors leave copious notes about a work they desperately wanted to write, but never actually managed to get round to the business of writing: you will find Milton’s Arthuriad, Dylan Thomas’s Adventures in the Skin Trade and Flaubert’s The Spiral among these. Of course, all the categories bleed into each other – Sylvia Plath left her second novel unfinished before it ‘disappeared’ and Pope technically started his epic poem Brutus, but wrote less than ten lines. If I have learnt one thing about literature, it is that categories are never clear-cut.

The most difficult thing about writing The Book of Lost Books was stopping writing it. Every week another lost work comes to my attention: Saint Augustine’s treatise on aesthetics, William Cobbett’s play Bastards in High Places, Pollio’s History of the Civil Wars, Patrick O’Brian’s first novel (lost in the Blitz)… left to my own devices, The Book of Lost Books would itself be a lost book, found by my family in fifty-odd years time, fifty times the length, and still unfinished. I should thank my wife, my editor and my bank manager that this is not the case. And, if the reader reading these words has also read the book, and found a woeful omission, a glaring absence or a staggering oversight, I would love to hear from you. Please email me at bookoflostbooks@hotmail.co.uk.