Is a movie literature? Probably not, in which case this is a hijack:
London After Midnight, a lost “vampire” movie starring Lon Chaney
The last half of Dicken’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Not knowing the ending drives me crazy.
Hillary Clinton’s Rose Law Firm billing records.
[sub]Or did they finally discover those?[/sub]
Anything by Shakespeare we’re not presently aware of. There’s the Love’s Labor’s Won thing, there’s Cardenio - but I’m not a fan of LLL, and I’d like to know if there’s anything else Shakespeare wrote solo.
I’d like to have the musical scores to all of King David’s songs.
I’d like to have a hardback copy of the book “Gadsby”, by Ernest Vincent Wright, which has been out of print for some time. It is a 50,000 word novel which never uses the letter “E”.
The original journals of Queen Victoria before her youngest, Princess Beatrice, edited them, copied from them, and then BURNED the originals! gasp
The journals and letters the Romanovs burned before they went into captivity.
The Antitheses of Marcion.
The Elements, by Euclid. There were many translations made but as far as I know the original doesn’t exist.
A Rosetta Stone type text which just happened to fortunately have the complete Minoan Linear A script and lexicon, the Indus (Harrapan Valley) Civilization script and lexicon, and ditto for the Etruscanspeak, (oh, and any other ancient language we have so damnably few traces of, like Iberian or Tartessian), along with a copious modern English translation for all five of course!
Plus, round that off with the complete works of Thespis, the works of that Hecataeus who preceded Herodotus, and, just for kicks, ANYTHING that would to the slightest degree mitigate our current complete lack of Carthaginian historiography or any classical writings from a Carthaginian perspective at that rate.
Ooh, there’s so much more… What a horribly tantalizing question for an, archaeology, classics, and history buff!
Oh well, if anybody was able to discover any of that stuff, they would be on the gravy train for life, damnably infuriating being reminded of what we lack.
Me too
The original is indeed lost, nut there are manuscripts (not translations) of most of it. IIRC there are some volumes that have not been recovered.
I would rather have a full set of Archimedes. We only have about a third of what he wrote and it is all fantastic ground-breaking stuff.