It was all I could do (that is, my girlfriend said, No!) not to steal it.’ Since then Hunt has been searching used bookstores for the book but has never found it.

‘I saw a copy once: a dark blue, leather bound Modern Library edition that sat unread on my girlfriend's uncle's shelf. ‘Curiously, it is a book I haven't read,’ says Laird Hunt of Lafcadio Hearn's Some Chinese Ghosts. my friends and I took to ransacking the lost-and-found bookstalls.and then I came across a strange and wonderful book.’ Hatterr, a book she discovered in 1974, ‘emerging from the safe portals of Bombay University's Sophia College. Pico Iyer's choice is The Saddest Pleasure by Moritz Thomsen, a strange travel book that is, in effect, ‘a journey towards extinction.’ Githa Hariharan picks All About H. Michael Ondaatje, one among several editors of Lost Classics, invites 73 contemporary authors to evoke books loved and lost, unavailable, stolen or extinct. A little known book that we once admired so much that we find ourselves urging friends to discover it.

A book that a reader only hears about which infects his imagination so much that he spends years looking for it! Finally, there is the one we are all best familiar with: a favourite book that has been overlooked or under-read. Here you will come across the book that disappears from a house during a divorce! A writer who commits suicide after finishing his work, and a reader who exhumes it from a second-hand bookstore. Jorge Luis Borges once noted that ‘a certain class of objects, very rare’ can be ‘brought into being by hope.’ And this is exactly what the writers in Lost Classics accomplish: they bring into being, simply by their devotion and hope, books that were lost, and return them to our secret bookshelves. Books are so vulnerable to destruction - from the material used to make them - paper - to the deliberate destruction of literature at the hands of fascists, religious zealots and spouses! Lost Classics and The Book Of Lost Books are two books that investigate two different kinds of book loss: one looks at personal loss, the other explores how the history of books is also a history of loss.

Lost Classics by Michael Ondaatje