Lost, stolen, eaten or burned, these are the words that the world will never read.

Thomas Carlyle: The French Revolution

Donatien Alphonse François de Sade: The most impure tale ever written

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: His First Novel (lost)

Nikolai Vasilievic Gogol: Dead Souls (the rest of the sentence, maybe)

William Golding: A paralysing prologue

Ivan Grozny (better known as “The Terrible”: The Tsar Book (not actually lost, turns out)

Ernest Hemingway: All his early writings

Shirley Jackson: The magic box

Franz Kafka: Max Brod’s suitcase

Franz Kafka: Dora Diamant’s letters

Jack Kerouac: The ending of On The Road

Philip Larkin: A notebook

TE Lawrence: The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Harper Lee: Her first attempt to kill a mockingbird

Herman: The missing pages of the world’s largest medieval manuscript

Malcolm Lowry: In Ballast to the White Sea (not Ultramarine)

Thomas Nickerson: The Loss of the Ship “Essex” Sunk by a Whale and the Ordeal of the Crew in Open Boats

Sylvia Plath: A second novel?

Miss Prism: An untitled three-volume novel (of more than usually revolting sentimentality)

Theodore Reinking: From the Danes to the world on the treachery of the Swedes

Bernhard Riemann: A potential proof of his own hypothesis

Olaus Rudbeck: Atlantica

José Saramago: Skylight (Clarabóia) — the novel “lost and found in time”

WC Sellar and RJ Yeatman: 1066 and All That in the back of a taxi

Dr Seuss: What Pet Should I Get?

Will. Shakespear: A Play (and more than 50 others by lesser-known playwrights)

Robert Louis Stevenson: The first draft of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Jim Theis: Page 49 of The Eye of Argon

Dylan Thomas: Under Milk Wood

John Kennedy Toole: A Confederacy of Dunces