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.

We learn this, and much more, in Stuart Kelly’s new book, “The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You Will Never Read” (Random House,368 pages,$24.95). It is a compilation of the equivalent of a large library of books that cannot be read. Many of them were written and lost, like the works of Shakespeare and Homer already mentioned. Many of them were planned and never completed, like Milton’s “Adam Unparadiz’d” and Vladimir Nabokov’s sequel to “Speak Memory,” tentatively titled “Speak America.” Some were intentionally destroyed, like Byron’s “Memoirs.”

Mr. Kelly, a graduate of Oxford who regularly reviews for Scotland on Sunday, has written an engaging book with a thesis that should wring the heart of every bibliophile.

He describes himself as, from the time he was a teenager, an obsessive collector of complete sets, like the complete works of Agatha Christie. When he turned to serious literature he was horrified to learn that the “complete” Greek drama was incomplete, that of the 80 plays written by Aeschylus we have only seven, and that only seven also survive of the 120 plays of Sophocles. Euripides also suffered at the hands of time with only 18 plays remaining out of nearly 100 written.

According to Mr. Kelly, the survival of any literature seems almost a miracle. What we refer to as the Western canon “exists by chance, not necessity, a lucky crag protruding from an ocean of loss.” And reading Mr. Kelly’s tale we can almost believe him. The works of K’ung Fu-tzu, whom most of us know as Confucius, were destroyed when the emperor of the time decided to burn all the books he regarded as subversive of the social order. It was only by an extraordinary feat of recall that Confucius’s students rewrote most of them from memory. All that remains of Aristotle’s “Poetics” are notes made by a student. All that remains of the poetry of Caedmon, the earliest English poet whose name we know,is found in a copy of the Venerable Bede’s “History of the English Church and People.” Bede had translated the poems into Latin, and a thoughtful reader had inscribed in the margin of his copy the actual words of Caedmon in Old English.

And it is not only the ancients who fall under Mr. Kelly’s purview. It was Kafka, for instance, who left instructions with his friend and executor Max Brod to burn all of his manuscripts. Thanks to the fact that Brod felt that the works were too precious to destroy, we have some of the most profound masterworks of 20th century literature. Posterity was well served by Max Brod. It was less well served when in 1922, the suitcases containing all the manuscripts that Ernest Hemingway had written up to that point were stolen.

Of course, it’s also true that much of what has vanished may not necessarily be a loss. Until fairly recently all of the works of the Greek comic dramatist Menander were lost, with the exception of a few thousand individual lines that survived in anthologies. In antiquity Menander’s comedies were venerated. Even as unlikely a person as St. Paul quoted him in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, though the quotation was unacknowledged. Posterity praised him. Goethe, 200 years after the last known manuscript had disappeared, praised his “unattainable charm,” speaking more aptly perhaps than he realized.

But lo and behold, in 1905, fragments of his play, “Dyskolos” were discovered in an excavation, and in the early 1950’s very nearly all of the rest of the work was acquired by a Swiss collector. Scholars burnt the midnight oil to translate and piece together a workable script. The result was disappointing, to say the least. “Tell me why Menander is anything but a wet fish?” G.S. Kirk, the Regius professor of Greek, is supposed to have said when he visited Yale University.

Says Mr. Kelly, “Menander had been regarded as the hypothetical progenitor of a dramatic line that culminated in Shakespeare, Moliere, and Feydeau. Introducing him back into the theatrical repertoire now seemed as sensible as cloning a caveman and asking him to cook for a dinner party. Lost, Menander was a genius; found, he was an embarrassment.”

Today, when there are nearly 100,000 books published every year, and at least 99,000 deserve to be lost, obsolescence seems to be built into the culture of the printed word. And I, for one, would not shed a tear for those 99,000.

But I would give anything to read one of the lost plays of Aeschylus; or the lost epistles of St. Paul; or the original version of Carlyle’s “The French Revolution” that John Stuart Mill’s housekeeper accidentally threw into the fire; or the completed “Remembrance of Things Past” or “The Man Without Qualities,” both of which were left unfinished when their authors, Marcel Proust and Robert Musil, died. I also often wish that the “person from Porlock” had never interrupted Coleridge when he was writing “Kubla Khan,” or that Gerard Manley Hopkins had not destroyed all his youthful poetry when he decided to devote his life to God.

Though he is no stylist, Stuart Kelly can produce the amusing phrase, as when he describes Zola as a “perpetual prosification device.” His scholarship is immense and lightly borne. He has written an entertaining and sobering book about mutability, impermanence, and loss. None of his readers will ever feel the same about the printed word.

Mr. Volkmer last wrote for these pages about poet Edward Field.