Lost books -see this post at Memorabilia Antonina- fascinate me. So do imaginary books. They're both a tease, suggesting unexplored literary landscapes while reminding us of that they're out of our reach.
I'm trying to remember examples of fantasy works wherein an imaginary book is regarded as lost. Right now I can't come up with anything, but they exist for sure. Conversely, I wonder if some of the works which we now regard as lost in truth never existed; a joke played on posterity by our ancestors.
Has any fearless classicist ever tried rewrite a lost work? To provide plausible, if fanciful, reconstructions the two missing parts of Aeschylus' Prometheus trilogy for example? The techniques pioneered by Pierre Menard could be of use...
Perhaps we should consider these two conditions, being lost and being imaginary, as part of the natural lifecycle of books. Because every book starts as an imaginary, unbirthed entity in the mind of its author. And every book will eventually be lost and forgotten at some point; entropy will take care of that.
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