The lost-and-found treasure hunt

SPEAKING VOLUMES

In A Reading Diary, Alberto Manguel compiles his list of books for a "sentimental library". These include Alice Liddell's copy of Alice in Wonderland; the copy of Leaves of Grass that Walt Whitman gave to his lover, Peter Doyle; and whimsical but irresistible, Freud's copy of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

One could construct a parallel library: a repository of lost manuscripts. It would contain the missing works of Sophocles, all of Sappho's poems, Bhasa's lost plays, the Gandhari manuscripts found in the 1830s that crumbled before they could be read, the Hemingway manuscripts that were lost on a train, and a score of other missing-in-action books.

How do you recover the past? It can happen by serendipity, as with the fragments of a poem by Sappho, lost for over 2,600 years, that was found on papyrus that had been used as part of the wrappings for an Egyptian mummy. Or it can take years of devotion, as with the lost Alexandre Dumas work, The Knight of Saint Hermaine.

One of Dumas' novels was "recovered" last year, a swashbuckling, guillotine-haunted tale of Marie Antoinette. But The Knight of Maison Rouge hadn't been lost so much as forgotten: it was the first time in a century that the book had been brought back into print. Dumas fans were happy; a novel that hadn't been read for a hundred years was just as welcome a discovery as a novel that had been truly lost.

In the 1980s, a retired lecturer called Claude Schopp found a handwritten letter by Dumas that sent him to the archives. There, after five months, he found a serial by Dumas that had run in a periodical called The Universal Monitor.

The existence of the novel was known; it formed the final part of the Companions of Jehu trilogy, but was never published in book form. Dumas died before he could revise or finish The Knight of Saint Hermaine; Schopp used the author's notes to construct a suitable ending. The hero of the novel is a French sharpshooter who, in Dumas' fictional rendering of Trafalgar, is the man who shot Admiral Nelson.

In the case of most authors, a hunt for the final, unfinished novel would have been undertaken earlier; but Dumas was terrifyingly prolific, and with over 95 works to examine, The Knight of Saint Hermaine had slipped through the cracks of history.

The French language edition was published this year, and is outselling even the Potter brat's chronicles in Dumas' country. It's a mammoth work, even by Dumas' standards, weighing in at over 900 pages, and unusual in that he wrote it on his own, instead of relying on his vast stable of assistants. But his penchant for collaboration has survived his death; Claude Schopp has the detailed notes that Dumas had set down the sequel and is using them to write the "last Dumas".

But one of the most ambitious and exciting attempts to recover old manuscripts is happening in India. The National Mission for Manuscripts (http://namami.nic.in) has launched a campaign to collect, preserve, protect and archive India's manuscripts. It has recruited about 30,000 footsoldiers to track down manuscripts across the country.

Last year, they ran a pilot project in three states, Orissa, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh, covering most of Orissa and a sampling of districts in the other two states. Over a period of five days, with 2,700 surveyors fanning out to temples, madrassas, homes, libraries and other centres, they documented over 100,000 manuscripts""and picked up information on a total of 650,000 more.

Even if you assume that many of these manuscripts would have consisted of no more than fragments, and that a great deal of what was found would have been just the waste paper of the past, that's still a lot of history. In the lost and found department of literature, a fragment of an ode by Sappho, one missing novel by Dumas""these scraps are enough to fill us with excitement.

What the NMM is trying to do is to show us how much of our own past we haven't even bothered to find, because we never knew it was lost in the first place. If you have old manuscripts or information of any sort, contact them at director.namami@nic.in. It's a rare chance to be part of India's largest treasure hunt.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com