Tsondoku is the Japanese term for the quirk of buying books and letting them literally pile up unread. If this were a deadly disease, I would have passed away about a decade before I was born.
It’s a blend of two words: tsumu (積む, "to pile up") and doku (読, "to read"), cleverly combining the act of stacking books with the intent to read them. The term doesn’t carry a strict judgment—it’s more a playful acknowledgment of a common behavior among bibliophiles.
I don’t consider that growing pile of unread books as anything bad—in fact, I view it as a sort of savings account. I’m currently reading a book about WWI naval skirmishes in the Mediterranean and then, when I finish it tonight, I’ll be able to select a new book from a wide selection of available tomes. I have no idea what I will read next, but I’m sure it will be a good choice. (I’m leaning towards that book on the works of Edward Hopper.)
The proper way of thinking about Tsondoku is that having your treasure trove of unread books is the same as living in a five-star restaurant that has an extensive menu. The selection is part of the enjoyment.
This is all a very long introduction to what I really want to talk about—the books I will never have a chance to read. The books that have been lost.
There is no chance, for example, that I will ever get to read Hemingway’s first novel that was based on his experiences as an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I. Hemingway was working as a journalist in Switzerland and asked his wife to bring him his collection of unpublished short stories, his notes, and the manuscript of his unpublished novel. While traveling by train, she stepped off the train momentarily to buy a bottle of water. When she returned, the suitcase containing Hemingway’s writings had been stolen.
His wife wept the entire eight-hour journey to Switzerland, dreading having to tell her husband of the loss. At first, Hemingway laughed at the story, assuring her it didn’t matter, because he always made carbon copies of his work. He stopped laughing when she informed him that the carbons were also packed into the suitcase.
Perhaps this is a good place to briefly mention that I’m still upset at the loss of the library at Alexandria. Among the countless treasures lost was Aristotle’s Second volume of Poetics—the book on comedy that is the center point of Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose.
There are a lot of books that have been lost for centuries that might still surprise you. Did you know that there was a second volume of Beowulf? The story you know comes from a single, singed volume that survived the 1731 fire at the Cotton Library in Westminster. While the first volume was damaged, the other volumes were destroyed. There were other copies in English libraries, but they were destroyed in Viking raids. If there is a remaining copy, it has yet to surface.
Did you know that at least one of Shakespeare’s plays is missing? Cardenio is a lost play attributed to William Shakespeare and his collaborator John Fletcher. It was performed in 1613 by the King’s Men, Shakespeare’s theater company, but no known copy of the original text survives.
The play was reportedly based on an episode from Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, specifically the story of Cardenio, a nobleman driven to madness by betrayal and heartbreak. In Cervantes' tale, Cardenio loves Luscinda, but his friend Don Fernando deceives him and marries her. Cardenio flees to the mountains, where Don Quixote later encounters him.
T. E. Lawrence, more popularly known as Lawrence of Arabia, lost the 250,000 word original manuscript of his Seven Pillars of Wisdom when he left his bag in the refreshment room of the Reading Station. When he returned, his bag had been stolen. Although he rewrote the book, the lost draft was rawer, longer, and possibly more candid about his wartime exploits and his psyche—potentially a truer epic than the polished rewrite. (There is a moral to this—Never travel by train if you have a manuscript.)
Jacques Futrelle, an American author known for his clever, puzzle-like mysteries, perished along with 1500 other people in the sinking of the Titanic. In his stories, the main character, Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen—nicknamed "The Thinking Machine,"—used pure logic to solve seemingly impossible crimes. Futrelle had gained significant popularity with stories like The Problem of Cell 13, and he was carrying new, unpublished manuscripts on his ill-fated journey aboard the Titanic in April, 1912.
To finish, let me tell you about the lost book I think about most often. As a teenager, I loved the books by Donald Hamilton. I read a half dozen Matt Helm novels in a week, then discovered his westerns, The Big Country and Texas Fever. I was hooked. Great literature they were not, but I really liked the way he told a story.
Donald Hamilton left behind an unpublished manuscript for one final Matt Helm novel, tentatively titled The Dominators, when he passed away in 2006. Hamilton had completed the manuscript years earlier but was unable to secure a publishing deal, partly due to declining interest in the series after the Cold War era and to shifting trends in the spy genre.
After his death, the rights to his work—including those to the unpublished novel—became entangled in estate issues. There have been occasional discussions about publishing The Dominators, but no agreement has been reached between Hamilton's estate and publishers. There have been some suggestions that the manuscript needs some editing.
If his family reads this, I’ll finish editing that manuscript for free*.
*Editors’ note: You, edit? Really?
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