The Lost Book series

perfectbound volumes; various page lengths, 6×9 inch trim. 2007.
$25 each; $100 for all five
open editions.

Riffing off the bibliophilic tendencies of desire — for the rare, the out-of-print, and the impossible — where scarcity commands the highest of desire, or where myth precedes value of content: a series of books from our catalogue of Lost Books. These books are all first editions of works that were never published, but have some grounding in the historical (if conjectural) record.

Edward Gibbon, The History of Democracy in Switzerland.
Gibbon is known primarily as historian of the Roman Empire. This was not his first major historical undertaking, having started work on a history of the Swiss Republic first. A lacklustre reception for the early drafts, however, led to a minor conflagration involving his manuscript.

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William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour Won.
The corpus of William Shakespeare is not, as we know, complete. His Folio editions were a selection of his plays, not a full collection. One of the plays that had been printed, but lost to contemporary scholarship, includes a sequel to Love’s Labour Lost, which we have printed in this edition.

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Confucius, The Book of Music.
K’ung Fu-Tzu, known in the west as Confucius, wrote the ‘Six Books’ in the sixth century BCE. Consisting of The Book of Poetry, The Book of Rituals, The Book of History, The Book of Changes, The Spring and Autumn Annals, and The Book of Music, knowledge of these books would be the basis of appointment to the Chinese bureaucracy for over 2000 years. Unfortunately, at some point in this period, The Book of Music was lost, leading some to claim that it never really existed.

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T. S. Eliot, Literature and Export Trade.
As with many poets, T. S. Eliot had a day job. In the twenties, his was writing reports on foreign currency movements for Lloyds Bank. The editor for Harvard College Class of 1910 Quindecennial Report managed to mangle this state of affairs, and added Literature and Export Trade to his corpus. We include this text in our series in respect of such editorial malfeasance.

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Mikhail Bakhtin, The Bildungsroman and it’s Significance in the History of Realism.
At the beginning of the Second World War, the book-length manuscript of Mikhail Bakhtin’s The Bildungsroman [Novel of Education] (1936-38) existed in two copies; one, the final draft, was at Sovetsky pisatel, the house that was preparing the book for publication, and an early draft, which he retained. As the publisher’s copy would form the basis of the printed edition, Bakhtin repurposed his copy as cigarette paper (in short supply) and, it is said, smoked it away over the course of the war. Alas, in the seige on Moscow, the editorial offices of Sovetsky pisatel (and the manuscript) were destroyed.

Download a preview of the book here.

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