Lost Worlds

A “funny, erudite, and fascinating” miscellany of things lost, large and small—from cultures to candies, species to sports gear—by the acclaimed columnist (A.C. Grayling).

They go. They vanish. People. Civilizations. Languages. Philosophies. Works of art disappear, species are extinguished, books are lost. Dunwich is drowned, Pompeii buried, Athena’s statue gone from the Parthenon, Suetonius’s Lives of the Great Whores gone the way of the Roman Empire. Whole libraries of knowledge, galleries of secrets. Gone. Little things, too. Train compartments. Snuff, galoshes, smog. Your mother’s perfume.

Michael Bywater argues that we are not defined by what we have but by what we have lost along the way. In Lost Worlds, he offers a witty, eclectic, and endlessly fascinating glossary of the missing, a cabinet of absent curiosities, weaving a web of everything we no longer have.