Thursday Things: Lost and Found Edition

9 March 2023. Vol 5 No 10. By Dan McGirt. #187

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Welcome to Sevilla. Who knows what you’ll find here? Photo by JP Files on Unsplash

Finding Lost Stories

I enjoyed Robert Ludlum’s early books — The Gemini Contenders and The Holcroft Covenant were two of my favorites. I lost interest after The Aquitaine Progression and never got around to the Bourne sequels or his other later works.

After Ludlum’s death in 2001 new books from him continued to appear. At least seven posthumous Ludlum novels were published. The official story was that these were books he had written before his death but hadn’t gotten around to releasing.

Which … okay. I guess I can buy that there might have been one or two completed novels and maybe a few partially complete manuscripts of projects that he started and abandoned. But seven? I’m a little suspicious.

I don’t doubt that many authors have died leaving behind unpublished works. But seven or more fat commercial suspense thrillers? Sounds like a conspiracy worthy of a Ludlum novel to me!

“Robert Ludlum” books continue to released to this day, but now they are openly attributed to other authors writing in his sandbox. There is a whole series of new Jason Bourne adventures along with follow-ups to some of his other books. I haven’t read these either.

However today’s item isn’t really about Robert Ludlum, but about fantasy author Sir Terry Pratchett!

And the “lost” works in question weren’t so much lost, as overlooked:

Rediscovered Terry Pratchett stories to be published

A collection of newly rediscovered short stories by Terry Pratchett, originally written under a pseudonym, are to be published later this year.

The 20 tales in A Stroke of the Pen: The Lost Stories were written by Pratchett in the 1970s and 1980s for a regional newspaper, mostly under the pseudonym Patrick Kearns. They have never been previously attributed to Pratchett, who died in 2015 aged 66, eight years after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

Wait, what?

The discovery of the stories is down to a group of Pratchett’s fans. One of the longer stories in the collection, The Quest for the Keys, had been framed on Pratchett fan Chris Lawrence’s wall for more than 40 years. When he alerted the Pratchett estate to its existence, the rest of the stories were unearthed by fans Pat and Jan Harkin, who went through decades’ worth of old newspapers to rediscover the lost treasures.

These were early stories by Pratchett, published in a newspaper long before he achieved fame with his Discworld series. Unlike Ludlum, Pratchett did not want any of his unpublished works to ever be released posthumously — he ordered his computer hard drive to be crushed under a steamroller after his death, and this was duly done.

But these stories weren’t unpublished, just unattributed. Via that loophole, Pratchett fans can look forward to some delightful new tales from the master:

None of the stories are set in Pratchett’s Discworld – the first book of which, The Colour of Magic, was released in 1983 – but according to the publisher they “hint at the world Sir Terry would go on to create”.

Readers, said the publisher, could expect to “meet characters ranging from cavemen to gnomes, wizards to ghosts, and read about time-travel tourism, the haunting of council offices and a visitor from another planet”.

These are lost stories I’m glad were found. I look forward to reading them!

Finding Lost Islands

I sometimes misplace my sunglasses and spend far too much time looking in all the obvious places — the car! jacket pocket! my backpack! — before then taking the search into increasingly unlikely place. Why would my sunglasses be in my sock drawer? They’re never there, and yet I look. Usually they turn up in some place I should have looked, but just didn’t consider.

Apparently, some countries have the same problem, except with islands.

Japan just found 7,000 islands it didn’t know it had

Japan has recounted its islands – and discovered it has 7,000 more than it previously thought.

Digital mapping by the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan (GSI) recently found there to be 14,125 islands in Japanese territory, more than double the figure of 6,852 that has been in official use since a 1987 report by Japan’s Coast Guard.

However, the GSI this week stressed that the new figure reflected advances in surveying technology and the detail of the maps used for the count – it did not change the overall area of land in Japan’s possession.

I suspect that many would-be Bond villains and other evil masterminds are now stressing out that their previously overlooked secret island lairs have now been accounted for.

But I still don’t know where my sunglasses are.

Finding Lost Books

I recently read The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World's Greatest Library by Edward Wilson-Lee, which is a biography of Christopher Columbus’s illegitimate son Hernando Columbus and an account of his ambitious project to establish in Sevilla a library that would collect everything ever printed. It’s a fascinating book, especially for book lovers, and I strongly recommend it.

Much of Hernando Columbus’s collection was lost in a shipwreck, and many other volumes in the collection disappeared over the centuries, so that only a few thousand volumes from his great library remain. However, HC (as we’ll call him for brevity) also pioneered one of the first library catalogue systems, which was really more like a paper-based search engine. This catalogue included summaries of the books in his collection — including those lost in the titular shipwreck. So while many of the books have disappeared, we still have HC’s summaries.

Which leads me to this news item — another volume of HC’s catalogue was discovered in Denmark a few years ago.

Book of Lost Books Discovered in Danish Archive

Christopher Columbus may have explored oceans, but his illegitimate son, Hernando Colón, explored the mind. In the 16th century, he amassed somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 books, part of a pie-in-the-sky effort to collect “all books, in all languages and on all subjects, that can be found both within Christendom and without.” As part of this ambitious endeavor, he commissioned an entire staff of scholars to read the books and write short summaries for a 16-volume, cross-referenced index. Called the Libro de los Epítomes, it served as a primitive sort of search engine. Now, researchers have found one of those lost volumes, a precious key to many books lost to history.

After Colón’s death in 1539, his massive collection ultimately ended up in the Seville Cathedral, where neglect, sticky-fingered bibliophiles, and the occasional flood reduced the library to just 4,000 volumes over the centuries. Luckily, 14 of the volumes of the Libro de los Epítomes index survived, and are now held at the Biblioteca Colombina in Seville, an institution that manages the collection.

Thousands of miles away from Seville, though, one of the lost copies survived, tucked away at the Arnamagnæan Institute at the University of Copenhagan, which houses the vast library of Icelandic scholar Árni Magnússon. Professor Guy Lazure of the University of Windsor in Canada was there when he realized the foot-thick, 2,000-page tome he was looking at may have been one of the lost volumes.

Yes, this article is from three years ago, but it’s new to me, and completely fascinating.

Edward Wilson-Lee of Cambridge University, whose biography of Colón, The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books, was recently released, calls the find nothing less than extraordinary in an interview with Alison Flood of The Guardian. "It’s a discovery of immense importance, not only because it contains so much information about how people read 500 years ago, but also, because it contains summaries of books that no longer exist, lost in every other form than these summaries,” he says.

I won’t go on about it. Read the article and Wilson-Lee’s book if this topic interests you. What intrigues me is how many other “lost” works must still be out there buried in the back of an archive, misfiled in a library, encrypted in a hard drive or waiting to be found in some even more unlikely place!

Thank you for reading!

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