Lost Manuscripts
Destroyed, hidden, or never quite finished. Known only by their absence.
5 volumes
A small brown book of the myths and legends of a dying Earth, carried across four volumes by a torturer who cannot forget anything he reads.
An incoherent manuscript left by a Chinese governor who abandoned power to write a novel and build a labyrinth. His heirs found the novel unreadable and the labyrinth missing. They were the same object.
The genuinely lost second book of Aristotle's Poetics, dealing with comedy — reconstructed by Eco, hidden in a Benedictine library, and defended by a murderer who poisoned its pages.
A book of dragon-summoning stolen from the Unseen University Library by a secret society, on the theory that a dragon would make an excellent political instrument.
A German study of surviving secret cults, printed in Düsseldorf in 1839. Its author was strangled six months later in a locked room, and the manuscript of his second book was torn to shreds.