In 1345 he personally discovered a collection of Cicero’s letters not previously known to have existed, the collection Epistulae ad Atticum, in the Chapter Library (Biblioteca Capitolare) of Verona Cathedral
So basically a guy goes into a library, rummages for a while, and finds ~1400 years old text no one knew was there
Do we still have places that store texts (like libraries, but doesn’t have to strictly be a library) where we don’t have everything catalogued and we don’t know what might be inside?
I would assume that almost any old library or private collection that includes old handwritten books has at least a couple of manuscripts that nobody has read in decades if not centuries.
A few years ago, a researcher started going through a large stack of dusty old music manuscripts in an east European archive, and discovered an unknown work by Stravinsky, over 100 years old. I wonder what was in the rest of rhe stack.
Huh, that’s an example of what I’ve been looking for
What phrase should I search for to learn more about the archive?
I Googled “Unknown Stravinsky Work Discovered,” and found a bunch of articles, including these:
https://stringsmagazine.com/igor-stravinsky-work-found-amid-stacks-of-hidden-manuscripts-after-100-years/#%3A~%3Atext=Russian-born+20th-century+composer%2Cold+manuscripts+at+the+St.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/a-rediscovered-stravinsky-work-from-before-he-made-his-leap-into-the-unknown
Thank you!
Another interesting example is a story by singer and Gershwin scholar Michael Feinstein. When he was a teen, he fell in love with George Gershwin’s music, and discovered that his brother, Ira, the legendary lyricist who supplied the words to most of George’s songs, lived nearby.
He went to Ira’s house and knocked on the door, and introduced himself. Ira was happy to talk to the kid about he and George’s old songs. During the conversation, Ira opened up the piano bench, and it was filled with old manuscripts in George’s hand of totally unknown songs that had never been published.
Feinstein ended up being the annointed by Ira as the unofficial Gershwin scholar, and he later recorded many of those unknown songs.
He also told this story on NPR’s Fresh Air:
Interesting indeed
But also those two are cases when we discovered more or less “working copies” of interest.
Has there been a similar find of a text that was copied and given (I’m trying to broadly cover a meaning of “published” here)
But do we know if those have been generally indexed?
In proper libraries, we probably have the author and title in a database somewhere but not the content. In private collections, all bets are off.
I guess the community of private collectors might have (doesn’t have to be institutionalized, centralized nor digital, just the fact of knowing is enough) as a group some kind of grasp on who has what. But is that fact known?
Collections might have been inherited over generations. For some of them, the current owners may not have much interest in what they have and therefore not be aware of some rare copies.
Yes, for sure. But then that’s a “lost cache”. Similar to the works we’ll find in a few years buried somewhere under the ground. But what about “active collections”?