Books are perhaps humanity’s greatest invention. With just a few deft strokes, you’re able to preserve your words for someone from the future to eventually read.

They’re the first-ever time machines, letting us later generations know exactly what a person feels and thinks even centuries after their death.

But they’re fragile things. A ton of books carrying knowledge, detailing ancient events, and providing insights on our cultures and societies were not able to survive the many destructive elements of our world.

Books Lost to History

Sadly more than one book has been lost to history (that’s one too many in my opinion). Unless someone rediscovers an intact copy, we can only guess at what they contain.

For book lovers, that’s torture. We don’t want to guess, we want to know. Sure, the books in the Vatican vault are probably something we’ll never see, much less read, but at least we know there’s a physical copy out there. Here are a few volumes lost to time:

1. Margites by Homer

You know Homer from his Iliad and Odyssey, two of the oldest and most venerated pieces of literature known to history. They’ve influenced countless writers and poets, and have been subject to numerous scholarly studies. His Margites would have probably enjoyed the same popularity if it had survived.

From the references made by Aristotle, Plato, and other works by famous ancients we know that Margites is about a tremendously stupid man who was so moronic that he doesn’t even know who birthed him.

It seems that even in ancient times, there’s something about extreme idiots that make people laugh. Even today, the popularity of dimwitted characters like Bill and Ted from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Inspector Clouseau from The Pink Panther, and pretty much most of Jim Carrey’s characters ensure that Margarites would have a thriving audience in contemporary times.

2. The History of Cardenio by William Shakespeare

The Bard is known as the greatest English writer and as the world’s greatest dramatist. He’s produced tons of plays and poems that have been translated, adapted, studied, and performed more times than any other litterateur.

Cardenio‘s contents are unknown but scholars widely agree that it is likely based in a part of  Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, where a young man named Cardenio is driven mad and lives in the mountains.

Two plays, Double Falsehood by Lewis Theobald and The Second Maiden’s Tragedy by Charles Hamilton have been proposed as related to the lost play though scholars are divided on whether they’re really connected to Shakespeare’s work.

The difficulty of discovering, researching, and reconstructing this particular work has earned it the name of the Holy Grail of Shakespeare by enthusiasts. Given that Cardenio disappeared almost instantly, leaving only scraps as dubious proof of existence, it’s likely we’ll never know anything more about it.

3. Inventio Fortunata by Unknown

In the 14th century, an unnamed Franciscan monk from Oxford, England traveled the North Atlantic, mistaking the Arctic as the North Pole. He wrote his journey into a book called Inventio Fortunata or “THe Discovery of the Fortunate Islands.” Only six books were known to have circulated Europe before they were lost, with one being in King Edward III’s possession.

In 1364, another Franciscan monk narrated the contents of the book to Flemish writer Jacob Cnoyen, who included a summary in his book, Itinerarium. But his book also went missing.

Fortunately, the great cartographer Gerard Mercator was able to read it. Most of what we know about the Inventio Fortunata is found from Mercator’s letter to English astronomer John Dee. From what information he gleaned from a third-hand account of a lost book, Mercator then published a world map in 1569.

4. Byron’s Memoirs by Lord Byron

In early 1809, Byron began to write an account of his life and thought process. His friend,  John Cam Hobhouse, who was traveling with him at the time, persuaded him to destroy the work, but Byron refused.

In 1819, Byron gave the complete manuscript to his friend, Thomas Moore, with the only caveat that it not be published while he was alive. In July 1821, Moore, with permission from Byron, sold the manuscript to Byron’s publisher John Murray, where it remained as a manuscript until Byron’s death in 1824.

Within minutes of Byron’s death, Hobhouse began to push for the manuscript’s destruction. A meeting was held to discuss the matter. In attendance were Moore, Hobhouse, Henry Luttrell (a friend of Moore’s), and Murray. The argument was so fierce that Moore even considered a duel with Murray to end the matter.

But Moore’s protests were soon drowned out and the one and only manuscript of Byron’s Memoirs was torn up and burned in a fireplace. It has since been described as the greatest crime in the history of literature.

5. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde‘s first draft by Robert Louis Stevenson

Rumor says that Stevenson wrote the 30,000-word first draft in only three days. But his wife, Fanny Stevenson, disliked it so much that Stevenson burned the draft (still up to debate though) and rewrote it from scratch.

In 2000, letters between Fanny to W.E. Henley (a peg-legged poet who was the inspiration for Treasure Island‘s Long John Silver) were discovered by Henley’s descendants.

In the letter, Fanny calls the first draft utter nonsense, signing off by saying “I shall burn it after I show it to you.” Whether Stevenson, his wife, or someone else destroyed it, the fact is that we’ll never be able to read the first draft.

But the second draft still remains a classic and enjoyable read. It’s become one of the most recognizable stories in literature, not to mention one of the best gothic horror novels in history.

6. A World War 1 novel by Ernest Hemingway

In December 1922, Hadley Hemingway, Ernest’s first wife was preparing to travel to Switzerland to join her husband. She packed several original copies of her husband’s short stories and a partial novel in a suitcase which was promptly stolen en route.

Writers often use carbon paper to immediately create secondary copies of their works, but Hadley also mistakenly included them in the suitcase. Only two short stories survived the disaster— one deemed unpublishable, and the other was in the hands of an editor.

According to Stuart Kelley’s The Book of Lost Books, a drunk Hemingway was known to claim that this was the reason he divorced Hadley. He never attempted to search for the stolen manuscripts nor try to replicate them, moving on to write different works instead.

7. On Sphere-Making by Archimedes

In 1901, a device was found from an ancient shipwreck that defied everything we had currently known about the ancient Greeks. Named the Antikythera mechanism, it is regarded as an early precursor to a computer and can accurately calculate the position of stars and planets.

It’s so advanced that scientists of today are still struggling to replicate or make it work. The difficulty of the task could be attributed to the loss of a tome called On Sphere-Making by Archimedes who is considered one of the leading scientists of classical times. It might have contained theories, formulas, and diagrams of making advanced machinery like the Antikythera mechanism.

It was lost during the Roman invasion of Syracuse in 212 BC. It is unclear whether it was destroyed (by the Romans or Archimedes himself) or looted.

8. Lost Books of the Bible

Depending on the denominations, the Christian bible has between 66 and 84 books, divided between the Old and New Testament while the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, has 24.

Missing from these two holy collections are the books that have become known as the “lost books” of the Bible. By “Bible”, what is meant are the books recognized by both Christians and Jews as included in the Old Testament as well as what Christians alone consider part of the Apocrypha or Deuterocanon.

Some are lost due to being removed from the biblical canon, while others are lost in the true sense of the word. Their only proof of existence is the references made to them by the other books of the Bible.

The First and Second Book of Kings and the First and Second Book of Chronicles mentions a “Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah” and a “Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel.”

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