Lost and Found

Some examples of lost, mislaid, stolen, or destroyed, music, books, and films, plus some subsequently recovered.

Keith Waterhouse left the first 10000 words of his novel Billy Liar in a taxi and had to start it again.

John Stuart Mill accidentally destroyed the only manuscript of Thomas Carlyle's French Revolution, mistaking it for scrap paper and setting fire to it, but Carlyle rewrote it and it became a classic.

Andre Malraux's manuscript novel The Struggle against the Angel was destroyed by the Germans in World War Two; Malraux, who fought in the French Resistance, was also captured but survived. Only a fragment of the book escaped destruction, and was later published as The Walnut Trees of Altenburg. Malraux did not write any more novels, but served in de Gaulle's governments and became an important art historian.

John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester burned many of his more immoral poems when he decided to reform.

Ralph Ellison lived 40 years after the publication of his masterpiece Invisible Man without ever producing a followup, but with many excuses for not writing it - he claimed to have lost 365 pages of it in a house fire, but the truth of this excuse is disputed. His work in progress was published posthumously as Juneteenth.

Fantasy writer David Eddings accidentally burnt down his office when he attempted to test whether a liquid leaking from his car was water or gasoline by setting fire to it. However, it was not reported that he lost any work.

William Faulkner died in 1962; The Dreadful Hollow, a vampire screenplay set in Victorian England and possibly written as a joke, was found among his papers in 2007. Faulkner was a successful screenwriter, working on The Big Sleep, Mildred Pierce, and To Have and Have Not among other films, and there were rumours when it was discovered that The Dreadful Hollow would be filmed with a $60m budget, but this doesn't seem to have happened.

Graham Greene's detective novel The Empty Chair written in the mid 1920s was unearthed in his archives in 2008. Unfortunately he never finished it, so nobody knew whodunnit.

Many works narrowly escaped destruction on the author's death when friends and relatives disobeyed the author's will. Nabokov left instructions for his unfinished manuscript The Original of Laura to be burnt after his death in 1977. His wife saved it and it sat in a Swiss bank vault for 30 years. Despite being little more than notes on index cards, it was published in 2009; reviewers were embarrassed or critical (Washington Post, Guardian, Telegraph). Virgil did not finish writing the Aeneid before his death, and legend says he ordered its destruction. Max Brod failed to carry out Franz Kafka's wish that he destroy unfinished manuscripts. In contrast, Ted Hughes destroyed some of Sylvia Plath's diaries upon her death, apparently without her authorisation.

Gerard Manley Hopkins spent his lifetime agonising over whether he should write poetry and released only a few mild verses that did not show his true genius; he died in 1889 but it wasn't till 1918 that his friend Robert Bridges published his poems. Emily Dickinson was another poet almost unpublished during her life; she died in 1886 and her sister Lavinia discovered her poems shortly after; they were published by friends in 1890. However, this collection was heavily edited and it was not until 1955 that a scholarly edition was produced that made no attempt to correct her strange rhythms and half-rhymes.

The history of popular music is full of legendary missing recordings. The mastertapes of Green Day's Cigarettes and Valentines album were stolen and they recorded something else instead - the American Idiot album. The tapes of an album by Peter "Where do you go to my lovely?" Sarstedt recorded in 1970 were lost for 30 years; it was released as the Lost Album in 2008. There is a missing album by Johnny Marr and Ian McCulloch (Echo and the Bunnymen), recorded in 1993, stolen from a courier van on their way to fellow Bunnyman Will Sergeant.

The BBC followed a deliberate policy of deleting old programs on videotape so that the tapes could be reused. This means there are no recordings of episodes of classic shows from Doctor Who to Dad's Army, as well as classics like Hancock's Half Hour, live broadcasts from Top of the Pops to the BBC's coverage of the first moon landing, adaptations of Madame Bovary and For Whom the Bell Tolls, and many televised plays including The Madhouse on Castle Street (1963) which featured Bob Dylan's first acting performance. Sometimes an old telecine recording turns up, or a tape leant to an African broadcaster returns home, but the supply is surely drying up.