Sunday Morning Book Thread 6-21-2026 [Sabrina Chase]

Welcome to the Book Thread, Guest Poster edition! I will be your host as we explore all sorts of book-related topics. All usual Book Thread rules are incorporated by reference (pets, beverage, clothing covering the lower limbs, etc.) with the special Sabrina Chase exemption for those stylish persons preferring kilts. Now let us proceed to today's topic, which is ...

A book-lover's life has many sorrows. Authors that won't write the next book in the series (as if death is any excuse!), insufficient time/money/cats to read as much as you want, and injuries caused by insufficiently secured TBR piles. But the cruelest cut of all is to know of a book by name, by reference, by a few scattered quotations, that no longer exists. War, fire, ideological purges, dogs ... many things can make books disappear especially from the times before printing. Hand-copied books were, of necessity, few in number. We have the Illiad and the Odyssey, but there are four other tales from that epic that no longer exist. Several plays by Euripides are missing. A treatise on comedy by Aristotle (we have the one on tragedy). Most of the poetry of Sappho is only known from fragments.

However! There is a bright spot in the darkness. Advances in science and in archaeology mean that some books previously thought too damaged to ever be read again can be brought back to life, and a stellar example of this are the carbonized papyrus scrolls from the Villa of the Papyrii in Herculaneum, caught in the explosion of Vesuvius that also toasted Pompeii. The image at the top is one of the scrolls in question, pretty much a charcoal briquette to look at but with clever scanning we can now actually start reading it. There are over a thousand scrolls from this villa, thought to belong to the father-in-law of Julius Caesar. The one scroll they have deciphered using this technique is a book of Epicurian philosophy, not one of the lost books, but with a thousand more to examine the chances are good a previously lost book will be in the pile somewhere!

This was all made possible by a contest funded by donations. Each success brings a monetary reward to the discoverer, and more goals remain. It sounds like the foundation has access to 300 of the carbonized scrolls, so something good is likely to appear as the contest progresses.

Besides scoping out burned scrolls, another way of recovering lost books is palimpsests. In the Middle Ages when books were written on vellum, thin prepared hide, it was so expensive that ancient books deemed no longer of any use by medieval monks would be scraped so the surface could be reused. And with clever scanning techniques (again... ) the original text can now be recovered. One famous manuscript known as the Archimedes Palimpsest had two missing texts from Archimedes, the Method of Mechanical Theorems and Stomachion, both mathematical treatises; a commentary on Aristotle with no other copy; and speeches by Hyperides, a famous ancient Athenian orator.

And when printed books took the world by storm, many printers had no use for the large, heavy parchment books with the hand-lettered pages and cut them up for use as binding shims, filler, and cover boards. Several documents and scraps of text have been rescued from old print book bindings. Sometimes books were "bound in" with other texts and in the days before card catalogs or really any kind of organization system beyond size, nobody would know unless they opened the whole thing and read carefully.

So take note of all the trials and tribulations, and don't let this happen to future generations. Preserve the books, even (and especially) the electronic ones! As we say in the software bizness, one backup is no backup. Copy early and often (and for the love of Ghu CHECK THAT THE BACKUP WORKS!)

posted by Open Blogger at 09:00 AM

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