Books from popular series or characters where none are known to exist? 2 2

[drotto]

I know early books are not only very expensive, but many are very rare.  Are there books of poplar series and/or characters where there are no known surviving copies?

[kav]

wow great question.

[kav]

Not comics but check out these lost books:
 

• The only known copies of the score of the 1903 Scott Joplin opera A Guest of Honor were believed to be confiscated during a dispute between Joplin and the owner of a theatrical boarding house. The score was never recovered by Joplin and it is believed to be lost.
• James Joyce's play A Brilliant Career (which he burned) and the first half of his novel Stephen Hero. His grandson Stephen later burned Nora Joyce's letters to James as well.
• Various parts of Daniel Paul Schreber's "Memoirs of My Nervous Illness" (original German title "Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken") (1903) were destroyed by his wife and doctor Flesching for protecting his reputation, which was mentioned by Sigmund Freud as highly important in his essay "The Schreber Case" (1911).
• L. Frank Baum wrote four novels for adults that were never published and disappeared: Our Married Life and Johnson (1912), The Mystery of Bonita (1914), and Molly Oodle (1915). Baum's son claimed that Baum's wife burned these, but this was after being cut out of her will. Evidence that Baum's publisher received these manuscripts survives. Also lost are Baum's 1904 short stories "Mr. Rumple's Chill" and "Bess of the Movies", as well as his early plays Kilmourne, or O'Connor's Dream (opened April 4, 1883) and The Queen of Killarney (1883).
• In 1907, August Strindberg destroyed a play, The Bleeding Hand, immediately after writing it. He was in a bad mood at the time and commented in a letter that the piece was unusually harsh, even for him.
• The French composer Albéric Magnard's house was set on fire by German soldiers in 1914. The fire destroyed Magnard's unpublished scores, such as the orchestral score of his early opera Yolande, the orchestral score of Guercoeur (the piano reduction had been published, and the orchestral score of the second act was extant) and a more recent song cycle.
• "Text I" of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a 250,000-word manuscript by T. E. Lawrence lost at Reading railway station in December 1919.
• The Irish Public Records Office in Dublin was burned by the IRA in 1922 during the Irish Civil War, destroying 1,000 years of state and religious archives.
• In 1922, a suitcase with almost all of Ernest Hemingway's work to date was stolen from a train compartment at the Gare de Lyon in Paris, from his wife. It included a partial World War I novel.
• The novels Tobold and Theodor by Robert Walser are lost, possibly destroyed by the author, as is a third, unnamed novel. (1910–1921)
• Jean Sibelius's 8th Symphony, which he destroyed after many years' work on it, apparently fearing it would be inferior to his 7th.
• The original version of Ultramarine by Malcolm Lowry was stolen from his publisher's car in 1932, and the author had to reconstruct it.
• Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi quotes extensively from Richard Wright's travel diaries in 1935/6. Following Wright's death they have become 'lost'.
• In 1938 George Orwell wrote Socialism and War, an "anti-war pamphlet" for which he could not find a publisher. Although many previously unknown letters and other documents relating to Orwell have been discovered in recent years, no trace of this pamphlet has yet come to light. With the beginning of World War II Orwell's views on pacifism were to change radically, so he may well have destroyed the manuscript.
• Lost papers and a possible unfinished novel by Isaac Babel, confiscated by the NKVD, May 1939. [3]
• Manuscript of Efebos, a novel by Karol Szymanowski, destroyed in bombing of Warsaw, 1939.
• Constant Lambert's ballet Horoscope was being performed in the Netherlands in 1940, and the unpublished full score had to be left behind when German forces invaded that country. It was never recovered, and only nine individual numbers remain.
• Until 2015 the German-language original of Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon was thought to have been lost and only the English translation by Daphne Hardy had survived.^[16]
• Five volumes of poetry and a drama, all in manuscript, by Saint-John Perse were destroyed at his house outside Paris soon after he had gone into exile in the summer of 1940. The diplomat Alexis Léger (Perse's real name) was a well-known and uncompromising anti-Nazi and his house was raided by German troops. The works had been written during his diplomat years, but Perse had decided not to publish any new writing until he had retired from diplomacy.
• Walter Benjamin had a completed manuscript in his suitcase when he fled France and arrest by the Nazis in the summer of 1940. He committed suicide in Portbou, Spain on September 26, 1940 and the suitcase and its contents disappeared.
• In 1940 The Magnet, a popular British Boy's paper, had to cease publication due to WWII paper shortage. At the time, at least four issues are known to have been already completed, but were never published, and were irrevocably lost during the war years.
• There are reports that Bruno Schulz worked on a novel called The Messiah, but no trace of this manuscript survived his death (1942).
• In 1944, just before the Warsaw Uprising, the Polish composer Andrzej Panufnik fled Warsaw, leaving all his manuscripts behind. When he returned to his apartment in 1945, he discovered that his entire oeuvre had survived the widespread destruction, but had then been burnt on a bonfire by his landlady. The lost works included two symphonies and other orchestral works, as well as vocal and chamber compositions; Panufnik subsequently reconstructed some of them.^[17]
• The novel In Ballast to the White Sea by Malcolm Lowry, lost in a fire in 1945.^[18]
• The novel Wanderers of Night and poems of Daniil Andreev were destroyed in 1947 as "anti-Soviet literature" by the MGB.
• Some pages of William Burroughs's original version of Naked Lunch were stolen.
• Three early, unpublished novels by Philip K.  written in the 1950s are no longer extant: A Time for George Stavros, Pilgrim on the Hill, and Nicholas and the Higs.
• The manuscript for Sylvia Plath's unfinished second novel, provisionally titled Double Exposure, or Double Take, written 1962–63, disappeared some time before 1970.
• There were known audio recordings of early performances by the Beatles, such as a song which featured Ringo Starr on drums before he was an "official" member. These tapes are thought to have been taped over or destroyed.
• Several pages of the original screenplay for Werner Herzog's Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes were reportedly thrown out of the window of a bus after one of his football teammates threw up on them.
• The screenplay for the proposed Dean Stockwell-Herb Berman film After the Gold Rush is reportedly lost.
• Diaries of Philip Larkin – burnt at his request after his death on 2 December 1985. Other private papers were kept, contrary to his instructions.
• Assault! Human, a 1972 tokusatsu series co-produced by Nippon TV and Toho, was lost when Nippon TV accidentally overwrote the master tapes in the early 1980s. While the suits created for the series were used by Toho in Go! Godman and its follow-up, Go! Greenman, no complete episodes of Assault! Human are known to exist, save for several short clips that were found on VHS and Betamax tapes. In addition to the aforementioned suits and footage fragments, supplementary materials, such as magazine articles, merchandise, reference books and the show’s theme song, have also survived.
• Hundreds of works by the Norwegian composer and pianist Geirr Tveitt were lost due to a house fire in 1970, when his house burned to the ground. Overall, about 4/5 of Tveitt's production are now gone from that fire, which included symphonies, concertos, choral works, operas, and many piano works. Fortunately some copies, parts, and recordings of some of the works existed elsewhere.
• Jacob M. Appel's first novel manuscript, Paste and Cover, was in the trunk of an automobile that was stolen in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1998. The vehicle was recovered, but the manuscript was not.^[19]
• Terry Pratchett's unfinished works were destroyed after his death fulfilling his last will.

[Readcomix]

Blue Beetle #43 is believed not to exist. (Note to that effect in OSPG)

[kav]

Captain America #80

[Mr. Spider-Woman]

This is a great topic. I've read a lot about lost TV shows and lost films but never anything about "lost" comic books.

Didn't Jerry Siegel and/or Joe Shuster destroy a very early Superman comic book that was never published? Does that count?

[Phantalien]

4 hours ago, kav said:

 

• Terry Pratchett's unfinished works were destroyed after his death fulfilling his last will.

I am not surprised by that.   He probably doesn't want to end up like Tolkien and having a relative try to put together "new" books.

[Jaylam]

This is a little bit off topic, but here's a link to the Wiki page concerning the 1933 Double Eagles. Out of 445,500 known to have been minted, only 13 are now known to exist, and if the government had had their way, only 2 should have survived. The story of these 1933 Double Eagles is so intriguing, I'm surprised it's not been made into a Hollywood Movie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1933_double_eagle

[RockMyAmadeus]

4 hours ago, Jaylam said:

This is a little bit off topic, but here's a link to the Wiki page concerning the 1933 Double Eagles. Out of 445,500 known to have been minted, only 13 are now known to exist, and if the government had had their way, only 2 should have survived. The story of these 1933 Double Eagles is so intriguing, I'm surprised it's not been made into a Hollywood Movie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1933_double_eagle

Hopefully, they're not so stupid that they'll melt the other 11. 

I was in DC earlier this year and got to lay my peepers on both the Smithsonian's examples.

There's a display in American History that has perhaps $100 Million in coins....the 1849 $20 (a $20M coin by itself), one of the 1933 $20s, a 1913 Lib 5c, several early gold proofs, both of the 1822 $5s...and it's likely no one else in the room knew how much that single case was worth.

[RockMyAmadeus]

8 hours ago, Readcomix said:

Blue Beetle #43 is believed not to exist. (Note to that effect in OSPG)

Was it ever made...?

[Readcomix]

3 hours ago, RockMyAmadeus said:

Was it ever made...?

IIRC, it's considered doubtful that it was. 

Just looked it up to look at the current OSPG notation -- it reads (#43 exist?)

I think it's believed not to, but then again, years ago, I recall one of the issues of Babe had a similar notation and no longer does. How cool would it be if a BB 43 ever turned up?

I thought it was Babe #5, but I have given away most of my old Overstreets and cannot be sure on that. I do have a #8 somewhere; that's pretty early; I will see if I can turn it up. Or maybe someone with an Overstreet collection can check my memory.

Fun topic!

Edited October 25, 2019 by Readcomix
More info

[Jaylam]

Teen Titans #20 (1969) has a story and art that was originally accepted and approved, but then rejected at the last minute because of a management change, resulting in the story and art being redone by Neal Adams. Apparently Neal was able to use some of the original art, including the cover, but according to the story I read (link provided below), the complete original story and art have been lost. I always wondered why Metropolis/ComicConnect has carried the notation that this is an "infamous censored issue" in their listings of this book and now I know why. The story involves some the greats of the Silver/Bronze Age (Nick Cardy, Neal Adams, Marv Wolfman, Len Wein, D. Giordano, Carmine Infantino and Irwin Donenfeld) and gives an inside look at the workings and interactions of the players involved in the metamorphosis of a book that was and then wasn't and then was again.

http://www.titanstower.com/secrets-behind-teen-titans-20/

Edited October 25, 2019 by Jaylam

[musicmeta]

3 hours ago, Readcomix said:

IIRC, it's considered doubtful that it was. 

Just looked it up to look at the current OSPG notation -- it reads (#43 exist?)

I think it's believed not to, but then again, years ago, I recall one of the issues of Babe had a similar notation and no longer does. How cool would it be if a BB 43 ever turned up?

I thought it was Babe #5, but I have given away most of my old Overstreets and cannot be sure on that. I do have a #8 somewhere; that's pretty early; I will see if I can turn it up. Or maybe someone with an Overstreet collection can check my memory.

Fun topic!

Very interesting.

[shadroch]

1964 Peace Dollar.

[Jaylam]

14 minutes ago, shadroch said:

1964 Peace Dollar.

That means the one I have must be a fake, how disappointing!

[shadroch]

I saw one about twenty years ago. It was almost certainly a fake. There are rumours of a.few in private collections but if one ever surfaced publicly, it would be confiscated in a heartbeat.

[shadroch]

It may have been resolved by now, but the number Ing of Whiz Comics presented quite a mystery in the 1980s. The first appearance of Captain Marvel has no # on the cover, but is listed as #2 inside. Then two different books have #3 on the cover. I don't think issue 1 was ever released.

Double Action is about as rare as they get, as far as I know.

[BlowUpTheMoon]

There are probably some ashcans that no longer exist. 

[Wipple]

Sparkling Stars - Holyoke Publishing from the 1940's. I have the entire run but no # 32. Its listed in overstreet, but is believed to not exist. Anybody know the back story ?

[Pickie]

21 hours ago, drotto said:

I know early books are not only very expensive, but many are very rare.  Are there books of poplar series and/or characters where there are no known surviving copies?

This is, in other words, the definition of the Gerber Scarcity Index No. "11" ("Non-existent, but kown to have been printed."). From "The Photo-Journal Guide to Comic Books" (Golden Age), Vol. 1, p. A-10; see his further comment:

The Guide is from 1989 (copyright date). I don't know if there's been a No. 11 assignment ever since.

Great topic!