Michael Ondaatje - Lost Classics: Writers on Books Loved and Lost, Overlooked, Under-read, Unavailable, Stolen, Extinct, or Otherwise Out of Commission

FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, AUGUST 2001

Essay by Margaret Atwood copyright 2000 by O. W. Toad. Essay by John Irving
copyright 2000 by Garp Enterprises. Essay by Wayne Johnston copyright 2000 by
1310945. All other essays copyright 2000 by individual contributors.

Introduction copyright 2000 by Michael Ondaatje, Michael Redhill,
Esta Spalding, Linda Spalding.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in slightly different form in hardcover in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2000.

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lost classics / edited by Michael Ondaatje [et al.].1st Anchor Books ed.
p. cm.
Originally published: Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2000.
eISBN: 978-0-307-78115-4
1. AuthorsBooks and reading. I. Ondaatje, Michael, 1943
Z1039.A87 L67 2001
028.9dc21 00-053128

Essays by the following contributors were originally published, some in a slightly different form, in Brick: A Literary Journal, numbers 6163: Margaret Atwood, Murray Bail, Russell Banks, Anne Carson, George Elliott Clarke, Robert Creeley, Douglas Fetherling, Charles Foran, Helen Garner, Michael Helm, Greg Hollingshead, Isabel Huggan, Laird Hunt, John Irving, Pico Iyer, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Alan Lightman, David Malouf, Harry Mathews, Erin Mour, Michael Redhill, Joanna Scott, Sarah Sheard, Esta Spalding, Sharon Thesen, Colm Toibin, Edmund White.

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v3.1

A BOOK THAT WE LOVE haunts us forever; it will haunt us even when we can no longer find it on the shelf or beside the bed where we must have left it. After all, it is the act of reading, for many of us, that forged our first link to the world. And so lost booksbooks that have gone missing through neglect or been forgotten in changing tastes or, worst of all, gone up in a puff of rumourgnaw at us. Being lovers of books, weve pulled a scent of these absences behind us our whole reading lives, telling people about books that exist only on our own shelves, or even just in our own memory. This is what was on our minds one rainy afternoon in Toronto, as we sat around a dining-room table where the four of us, every few months, make manifest a sporadic but long-lived magazine called Brick: A Literary Journal.

By 1998, when we conceived of the Lost Classics issue, Brick had become a neighbourhood, full of essays and interviews that in turn became an international conversation: writers caught weeding, caught chatting over fences, full of chagrin and sometimes surprised to recognize each other after a seasons quiet. So it felt natural to begin by asking some of our longtime contributors to tell us the story of a book loved and lost, books that had been overlooked or underread, that had been stolen and never retrieved, or that were long out of print. We wanted personal stories and they began to pour in.

Back in 1983, the novel received a fair amount of well-deserved attention John Irving wrote of The Headmasters Papers, with a note of premonitory despair. Margaret Atwood described a Swedish novel, a tattered paperback found in a secondhand bookstore. On the back of my copy are various encomiums, from the Observer, the Guardian, the Sunday Telegraph, the Glasgow Heralda masterpiece, the most remarkable book of the year, and so forth. Still, as far as I know, Doctor Glas has long been out of print, at least in its English version.

Helen Garner recalled meeting the author of a beloved childhood book, unknown by anyone she knew but that she remembered vividly. A real Australian person had written it! she noted triumphantly. We corresponded. I asked if she had a spare copy. She said she had only one left, but would lend it to me if I promised to return it. In due course it arrived. I hardly dared to open it. But when I did, out of its battered pages flowed in streams, uncorrupted, the same scary joy it had brought me as a child, before everything in my life had happened.

Before everything had happened. Before even the beloved book was entirely lost. The Lost Classics issue, as we called it, struck a chord that kept sounding long after publication. Essays continued to pour in on longed-for books of poetry, childrens stories, travel diaries, novels. Why not a