Book Blog – Likely Stories, from Booklist Online » Blog Archive » Books That Don’t Exist
Booklist Online

Booklist Online: More than 130,000 book reviews for librarians, book groups, and book lovers - from the trusted experts at the American Library Association

| | | | | | | | | | |
Book Blog - Likely Stories, by Keir Graff - Booklist Online

Likely Stories

A Booklist Blog
Keir Graff and editors from Booklist's adult and youth departments write candidly about books, book reviewing, and the publishing industry

« »

Monday, April 20, 2009 10:11 am
Books That Don’t Exist
Posted by: Keir Graff

In the Wall Street Journal, Stephen Marche has a nice piece on books that don’t exist (“Longing for Great Lost Works“)–not books that have been invented by authors for fictional purposes, but books that have been destroyed or lost forever. A poignant thought:

Classical literature, like classical architecture, is a collection of delicious ruins. The destruction of the library at Alexandria was probably a larger disaster than we realize, simply because we don’t know all that it held. It must have contained records of all the Greek works we’re missing, and the complete versions of the classical texts that survive today only in fragments. What about the literature of pre-Roman Egypt? What about the literature of the Phoenicians? These are maybe the saddest missing books, the ones that we don’t even know have existed. If we could have even one, even at random, what a light it would shed on our intellectual prehistory.

Still, without missing books, authors of contemporary bibliothrillers would be lost for plots. Take Michael Gruber’s The Book of Air and Shadows, for instance, the race to find an unknown Shakespeare play. And Carlos Ruiz Zafon (The Angel’s Game) wrings every last ounce of atmosphere out of the idea with his Cemetery of Forgotten Books. So, even just by the idea of their absence, these lost works still give us something worth reading.

Comments

comments


Leave a Reply



© 2014 Booklist Online. Powered by WordPress.
Quoted material should be attributed to:
Keir Graff, Likely Stories (Booklist Online).




HOME | | AWARDS | GREAT READS | BLOGS | NEWSLETTERS | WEBINARS | MY ALERTS | MY LISTS | MY PROFILE | HELP | SUBSCRIBE
BOOKLIST PUBLICATIONS
American Library Association
http://blog.booklistonline.com/2009/04/20/books-that-dont-exist/
blog.booklistonline.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-35
59805
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:FULEBCUWIIN7D6WCU7XJ7N6WFW5RS2JL
<urn:uuid:550cbf22-3d35-4c4c-bcd1-9dca36addf50>
2014-08-23T18:35:29Z
69.195.104.236
sha1:B4LVAXHO3DYQ3GBDOIBLS2GYI7YTEEBS
<urn:uuid:a3519126-0024-4e2c-b417-860f74fcf231>
http://blog.booklistonline.com/2009/04/20/books-that-dont-exist/
response
<urn:uuid:3ecd71d3-8bcc-4076-a6a8-543364de6479>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-180-136-8.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-35
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for August 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf