Review: Stuart Kelly's The Book of Lost Books

Unpublished books have been lost in many ways – left on trains, confiscated by authorities, shredded into pieces by maddened perfectionists. And it's no surprise that great swathes of classical literature have disappeared in the mists and the libraries of time. Not many works have been printed and still lost, but this fate befell the Dundonian writer John Ogilby, best remembered for his map-making.

All copies of his epic poem The Carolies, written in an age when attempting the great epic was the done thing, were destroyed. If I mention that by 1666, Ogilby was living in central London, you can guess the rest. John Milton was lucky, his better known epic Paradise Lost surviving the great fire to be published the following year.

The Book of Lost Books, now available in paperback from Penguin, is the first book by Scottish writer Stuart Kelly and, judging by the many well-deserved glowing reviews on the cover, is unlikely to become lost for some time. Kelly's success derives from getting the book's tone right – the articles are mainly a few pages long, but contain the right amount of well-researched background to stop the book becoming repetitive. And though he largely remains and unfussy and lightly scholarly commentator, his humour intrudes here and there while, on occasion, he adds an article written in a different mood to keep things fresh.

The book is made for dipping into though, and it's tempting in a review to cherry-pick the many satisfying snippets: The Mystery of Edwin Drood would be solved, had Queen Victoria not refused Dickens' offer to tell her the plot; Dylan Thomas managed to lose Under Milk Wood in Cardiff, America and London, each time getting lucky.

Some books have been deliberately destroyed. A disturbed Gogol burned five years' worth of work on what would have been parts two and three of the Dead Souls trilogy, though given his mental state, it is unlikely they would have lived up to the first book. The first sections of the Book of Mormon were confiscated (and probably later burned) by the cynical wife of one of Joseph Smith's assistants who wanted to test their divine status by seeing if they could be replicated. Spouses can be trouble for writers - one worries for the novel Sylvia Plath was working on at the end of her life, supposedly about an unfaithful husband, which is now reported missing.

Not all 'lost books' met such fates – many only existed in the minds of the authors. Novelists in particular like to scheme, commonly announcing to friends the commencement of work on a great work which never got beyond a few lines of plot in a letter and a great deal of daydreaming. Both Hawthorne and Melville planned (and failed) to write the novel Abigail based on the true tale of a woman who married a man she saved from a shipwreck, only for him to disappear and return after seventeen lost years. Poets can scheme too: for many years, Milton would pore over great lists of possible subjects and titles for the epic he knew he had in him.

Yet Kelly's book also touches on a worse fate for an author than losing a book – being all but lost to history themselves. Phrynicus revolutionised drama by moving beyond mere recitation, developing the mode of one actor playing characters, but none of his work survives. There is a portion of Ovid which speaks of the immortality of poetry and mentions Homer, Sophocles, Virgil and Gallus. The work of the last named, a love poet who killed himself after falling from favour with Augustus Caesar, is lost to us, and we know only the barest facts of his life.

Sometimes, being lost can actually boost a reputation. The story of the Greek dramatist Menander is one of the most fascinating here. Long considered the finest of the 'lost' geniuses of literature, classical scholars could only dream of the lines of the great playwright, of whom Plutarch had written, what reason does any educated man have of entering a theatre, except Menander? Then sections from Menander's work began to reappear a century ago, followed by nearly all of one play on an ancient papyrus. These works revealed Menander to have been at best 'of his time', and though his best works are doubtlessly the later lost ones, his reputation has seriously diminished.

Of course, one presumes there are great writers whose names have not even survived in our literature. But perhaps even that is preferable to the fate of Xenocles, a contemporary of Aristophanes, now only remembered via a few references to the poor quality of his work in his rival's plays and two apt lines ('O cruel goddess, O, my chariot smashed / Pallas, thou hast destroyed me utterly') used for the sake of mockery.