Walter Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher, born in Berlin in 1892. He was wide-ranging in his interests; his work waltzed from translations of verses by the French poet Charles Baudelaire to …| Lost Manuscripts
The author, Donatien Alphonse François, went to his grave believing his magnum opus had been destroyed. He wept “tears of blood” over its loss. The author was wrong. However, over one h…| Lost Manuscripts
In September 1953, a dog-eared typescript entitled Strangers from Within arrived at the offices of the publisher Faber. It had obviously visited several other publishers on its optimistic journey t…| Lost Manuscripts
Olaus Rudbeck (also known as Olof Rudbeck the Elder) was a frighteningly brilliant man. He was a philosopher, scientist, anatomist, inventor, and professor of medicine at Uppsala University. As an …| Lost Manuscripts
No self-respecting catalogue of lost manuscripts would be complete without mentioning Nikolai Vasilievic Gogol and his Dead Souls: Мёртвые души.| Lost Manuscripts
Paper was once precious. It is so ubiquitous today — newspapers, paper towels, wrapping paper, paper napkins, tissues — that we forget it was once a valuable commodity. Nowadays, paper …| Lost Manuscripts
A Confederacy of Dunces is a winding novel that follows the adventures of Ignatius J. Reilly, a lazy, obese, misanthropic, sometime hot-dog vendor in the French Quarter of New Orleans. The book was…| Lost Manuscripts
“The black box grew shabbier each year: by now it was no longer completely black but splintered badly along one side to show the original wood color, and in some places faded or stained.̶…| Lost Manuscripts
The Portuguese author José Saramago won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. The Swedish Academy praised his work “sustained by imagination, compassion and irony”. So, a pretty impor…| Lost Manuscripts
It’s an image that does not spring readily to mind. Franz Kafka — the tortured Czech-Jewish writer of our imaginations — once harboured an ambition to open a restaurant. In this c…| Lost Manuscripts