ABOUT 25 YEARS AGO I was on the trail of the Sunderland library, a great 18th-century library that had been scattered to the four winds at a series of auctions in the 1880s by that Napoleon of booksellers, Bernard Quaritch.

I was obsessed by one item missing from the sale catalogue: a phantasmagorical will-o’-the-wisp of a book, said to have been in the library, but never listed in the library catalogues; an item of the utmost importance, but one that had apparently vanished without trace; a milestone in the Renaissance rediscovery of Classical learning, but subsequently lost to scholarship: Poggio’s Quintilian — the first copy of the first complete text of Quintilian’s Institutiones Oratoriae to be discovered since antiquity, found by Poggio “almost perishing” at the bottom of a dank neglected tower in the French monastery of St Gall in 1416.

I traced its progress from hand to hand through the 17th century and into the library in the early 18th century via a sequence of auction catalogues, contemporary comments and scraps of paper preserved in the British Library. The surmise was that the manuscript had disappeared during the century and a half of neglect that the library endured at one of the nation’s grandest country houses (Blenheim), when the books rotted from damp and birds nested among the bookselves — purloined perhaps by some light- fingered intruder in the time of the reclusive 4th Duke of Marlborough or secretly sold to pay the debts of the infamously extravagant 5th.

In fact, Poggio’s Quintilian never reached that mouldering pile. It was sold, together with the rest of the manuscripts from the library, soon after its founder’s death, to the King of Portugal. I traced the three-year-long negotiations, the haggling and the prevarications, the cataloguing and the crating up, the final delivery to Lisbon — only to discover that the manuscript had almost certainly perished, with the rest of the king’s library, his palace and half a city, in the Lisbon earthquake of 1755.

I say “almost certainly”. For this is the territory of the great fabulists, of Borges and Eco, where books can be lost, forgotten, rediscovered and then lost again, like the subversive second book of Aristotle’s Poetics (“the book everyone believed lost or never written”) that proves to be at the heart of the mystery in Eco’s The Name of the Rose. These are themes that were explored more recently by Carlos Ruiz Zafón in the surprise bestseller of 2004, The Shadow of the Wind, with its unforgettable Cemetery of Forgotten Books; a world where texts are transmitted by copies of copies, and copies of copies of copies, each with their own misreadings and subtle distortions. This is a theme that received its latest reworking in Nicole Krauss’s new novel, The History of Love.

Such books are the subject of Stuart Kelly’s The Book of Lost Books, subtitled “an incomplete history of all the great books you will never read”. Here are the manuscripts of Thomas Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution, used by a careless housemaid to light the fire; of Byron’s incendiary autobiography, consigned to the flames after his death by an anxious publisher. Here too are Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour ’s Won, Ben Jonson’s scandalous The Isle of Dogs (which earned him a spell in prison), the nine lines of marginalia in the manuscript of Bede’s History of the English Church and its People, which are all that survive of the poems of Caedmon, the earliest English poet.

Some things were, perhaps, better lost. T. E. Lawrence mislaid the first draft of Seven Pillars of Wisdom on Reading railway station; the second draft, on his own admission, was “shorter, snappier and more truthful” than the first (he had been having such trouble with it that he may well have lost it on purpose). Hemingway’s anguish at the loss of all his unpublished typescripts, stolen in a suitcase en route to Switzerland in 1922, may have had its compensations in catapulting him headlong from juvenilia to the mature style of “Papa” Hemingway. Even Byron’s autobiography, the loss of which caused near hysteria at the time of its destruction, may have proved to be a damp squib, refusing to name names: Don Juan was Byron’s true, unfinished, autobiography, still ongoing at the time of his death.

Some things refused to be lost: Dylan Thomas lost the manuscript of Under Milk Wood not once but three times: first in London, then in America, and then again in London (where it turned up in a pub). Other things were never started: Milton, Dryden and Pope all planned epic versions of the Arthurian legend, long before Tennyson finally gave us Idylls of the King.

Still others were begun but never finished: Coleridge claimed to have been interrupted by a person from Porlock before he could finish Kubla Khan. But as it stands the poem is perfect — strange, otherwordly, hallucinatory — unfinishable: Coleridge may well have been tripping out at the time, and the man from Porlock only an excuse as his opium-fuelled dream dissipated. But perhaps the most famously unfinished work is Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, which ends with the incomplete sentence: “So that when I stretch’d out my hand, I caught hold of the Fille de Chambre’s . . .” This seems less like genius inconveniently interrupted by mortality (Sterne died in the year the book came out) than a joke from the grave.

Kelly seems to have an especial fondness for Sterne. Indeed, the ghost of Tristram Shandy seems to hover over the entire book. It is a Shandy-esque peregrination from Homer and Hesiod to Sylvia Plath and Georges Perec, with digressions, exclamations, changes of typography and a teeming cast of authors, critics, readers and careless housemaids, tempting us finally to exclaim, with Tristram’s mother: “Lord! What is this story all about?” — a question that Kelly answers in his unexpectedly affecting afterword. “Loss,” he says “is not an anomaly, or a deviation, or an exception. It is the norm.”

We struggle to record what is fleeting, seeking ever more durable means of preservation — from papyrus to codex, from microfilm to CD — all fated ultimately, with our whole civilisation, to subside into dust and silence. “We struggle unsuccessfully against oblivion,” he concludes, “and the struggling itself is our success.”

THE BOOK OF LOST BOOKS
by Stuart Kelly
Viking, £15.99; 416pp
£14.39 (free p&p) 0870 1608080
www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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