A Bibliophile’s Worst Nightmare
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

If you are a person with taste and an enquiring mind, and you enjoy reading the classic works of imaginative literature, you might want to pick up a copy of Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labour’s Won” or Homer’s great comic poem, “Margites.” You’re not familiar with them? Well, reading them would in itself require an act of the imagination, since neither work exists. Yet there are indications that at one time both did exist. Aristotle praises “Margites” in the fourth chapter of his “Poetics” as being the foundation for all Greek comic writing. There are indications that Shakespeare’s drama “Love’s Labour’s Won” was actually printed in an edition of a 1,000 copies. Both works have simply disappeared.
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