LOST BOOKS WATCH: In honor of World Book Day (23 April), Stephen Marche reflects in the Wall Street Journal on lost books. Two paragraphs merit excerpting. This one is spot on:

Classical literature, like classical architecture, is a collection of delicious ruins. The destruction of the library at Alexandria was probably a larger disaster than we realize, simply because we don't know all that it held. It must have contained records of all the Greek works we're missing, and the complete versions of the classical texts that survive today only in fragments. What about the literature of pre-Roman Egypt? What about the literature of the Phoenicians? These are maybe the saddest missing books, the ones that we don't even know have existed. If we could have even one, even at random, what a light it would shed on our intellectual prehistory.

But this one is a bit boorish:

Maybe the most disappointing literary rediscovery, although no one will admit it, has been the Dead Sea Scrolls. As archaeology, they are the most incredible find, genuine early texts found in caves on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea buried for two millennia. Ever try reading them? They're like the boring bits from "Moby-Dick," only somehow more boring.

For my own wish list of lost books, see here, here, and here.