I say this in all sincerity: this is not an appealing book in that the author somehow forgot that people would be trying to read it. That's the best way I know how to summarize my thoughts on this one.
The objective here was to list books which have been either "lost" or they never existed to begin with. Here's an example of the latter: "The Wolf" by Frank Norris which was never written because Frank Norris died before it happened.
A "lost" book featured by Kelly is Geoffrey Chaucer's "Book of the Leoun" whereas it's stated on page 105, "...of which no copies survive". Sometimes specific reasons are offered as to why such books were lost and in some instances Kelly remains a little vague on such points.
It was clear to me that Kelly decided that a little humor, subtly conveyed, might lighten up this possibly boring subject matter. I'll confess to grinning a couple of times but I really wanted to learn about "lost books" and the witty wallpaper sort of got in the way at times -- this is primarily a reference work and I think that the author would have served his readership better if he had eliminated the humor and filled the space with more facts about lost books.
With that, I will say that I extricated some information that was useful to me but I think that Kelly has inadvertently diminished his potentially superb book with a slight mishandling of the text.Buy The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read!
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