Classical world

Amerindian texts and codices

• The original Aztec codices were burned by Tlacaelel after Itzcoatl took power.
• Almost all pre-Columbian Aztec and Mayan codices were burnt by Catholic priests.
• Many Inca Quipus (which are considered by some a possible writing system) were burned by Spanish priests in 1583 on the orders of the Third Council of Lima.^[26] Only 751 quipus are known to have survived to the present.

Ancient Chinese texts

• Classic of Music attributed to Confucius.
• Medical treatise of the renowned physician Hua Tuo (traditional Chinese: 華佗; simplified Chinese: 华陀; pinyin: Huà Tuó) from late Eastern Han. The treatise was traditionally referred to as Qing Nang Shu (traditional Chinese 青囊書; simplified Chinese: 青囊书; pinyin: Qīng Náng Shū), literally Book in the Cyan Bag. When Hua Tuo was sentenced to death after incurring the wrath of Cao Cao, who controlled the Imperial Court, the physician tried to entrust the text to his gaoler. However, the gaoler was afraid of potentially implicating himself and in disappointment, Hua Tuo had the text burnt. Records of the Three Kingdoms Chapter 29, Book of Wei – Technology 《三国志卷二十九·魏书·方技传》
• Book of Bai Ze (simplified Chinese 白泽图; pinyin: Bái Zé Tú). A guide to the forms and habits of all 11,520 types of supernatural creatures in the world, and how to overcome their hauntings and attacks, as dictated by the mythical creature, Bai Ze to the Yellow Emperor in the 26th century BCE.
• Works of the 5th century BCE philosopher Yang Zhu burnt on the orders of the emperor Shi Huangdi, the founder of the Qin dynasty.

Ancient Japanese texts

• Tennōki
• Kokki

Ancient Indian texts

• Jaya and Bharata, early versions of the Hindu epic Mahabharata
• Bārhaspatya-sūtras, the foundational text of the Cārvāka school of philosophy. The text probably dates from the final centuries BC, with only fragmentary quotations of it surviving.
• Valayapathi, Tamil epic poem, only fragments survive.
• Kundalakesi, Tamil epic poem, only fragments survive.

Ancient Egyptian texts

• The Book of Thoth, a legendary manuscript alluded to in Egyptian literature believed to contain the secrets to comprehend the power of the gods and speech of animals.^[27]
• Additionally, thousands of other pieces are attributed to the deity Thoth. Seleuces noted that the number of his writings was 20,000 while Manetho held it was 36,525.^[28]

Avestan texts

• Avesta, the holy book of Zoroaster. After Alexander's conquest, avesta was fragmented and it has been said only third of it survived orally.
• Avesta recollected in 21 volumes, in Sasanian era, only a quarter of which survive.

Gnostic texts

• The Seventh Universe of the Prophet Hieralias, an unknown manuscript showing up by name inside the Gnostic piece On the Origin of the World.^[29]

Pahlavi / Middle-Persian texts

• Khwātay-Nāmag (Book of Lords) : A chronological history of Iranian kings from the mythical era to the end of Sasanian period. This book was an important reference for post-Sasanian and Islamic historians such as Ibn al-Muqaffa' as well as Ferdowsi in his epic work Shahnameh.
• Ewen-Nāmag: Multi-volume book on Iranian ceremonies, entertainment, warfare, politics, precepts, principles and examples in the Sasanian era.
• Zij-i Shahryār: An important work of astronomy.
• Karirak ud Damanak: A version translated into Pahlavi of the Indian work of fiction Pancatantra.
• Hazār Afsān or Thousand Tales: A Pahlavi compilation of Iranian and Indian tales. This work was translated to Arabic in the Islamic era and became known as One Thousand and One Nights.
• Mazdak-Nāmag: Biography of Mazdak, the Zoroastrian reformer and the primate of Mazdakism movement.
• Kārvand: A book of rhetoric.
• Jāvidan Khrad (Immortal wisdom): Quotations of the mythical Iranian king and sage Hushang.
• Scientific Works of Gondishapur Academy: Works of Greek, Indian, and Persian scholars of the Academy of Gondishapur on medicine, astrology, and philosophy. A remarkable part of their heritage was translated into Arabic during the Graeco-Arabic translation movement.

The Middle-Persian literature had a remarkable diversity based on historical accounts. Only a poor part of mostly religious texts survived by Zoroastrian minorities in Persia and India.

Lost Biblical texts

• Hexapla: a compilation of the Old Testament by Origen.

2nd century

• Hegesippus' Hypomnemata (Memoirs) in five books, and a history of the Christian church.
• The Gospel of the Lord compiled by Marcion of Sinope to support his interpretation of Christianity. Marcion's writings were suppressed but a portion of them have been recreated from the works that were used to denounce them.
• Papias' Exposition of the Oracles of the Lord in five books, mentioned by Eusebius of Caesarea.

3rd century

• Edict of Decius, 250 AD
• Various works of Tertullian. Some fifteen works in Latin or Greek are lost, some as recently as the 9th century (De Paradiso, De superstitione saeculi, De carne et anima were all extant in the now damaged Codex Agobardinus in 814 AD).

4th century

• Praeparatio Ecclesiastica,^[31] and Demonstratio Ecclesiastica^[32] by Eusebius of Caesarea
• History of Constantine the Great (known from a précis by Photius^[33]) by Praxagoras of Athens

5th century

• Sozomen's history of the Christian church, from the Ascension of Jesus to the defeat of Licinius in 323, in twelve books.
• Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus, a historical work of twelve volumes of which only brief fragments survive, a few passages being quoted in chapters eight and nine of the second book of Gregory of Tours' Decem libri historiarum (Ten Books of Histories)

6th century

• Cassiodorus's Gothic History, which survives only in a much shorter abridgement, the Getica of Jordanes

7th century

• The Kakinomoto no Ason Hitomaro Kashū is lost as a standalone work, although an unknown portion of it was preserved as part of the later Man'yōshū.

Anglo-Saxon works

• The Battle of Maldon, a heroic poem of which only 325 lines in the middle survive.
• Waldere, an epic which is now lost apart from two short fragments.
• The Finnesburg Fragment, comprising 50 lines from an otherwise lost poem.
• Bede's translation of John's Gospel, c. 735.
• Beowulf, after a fire in 1731 parts of the manuscript have been lost most notably being a large section of the fight between beowulf and the dragon towards the end of the poem. (c. 1000)^[34]

12th century

• Three works by Gerald of Wales:
  • Vita sancti Karadoci ("Life of St Caradoc")
  • De fidei fructu fideique defectu
  • Cambriae mappa
• A romance on the subject of King Mark and Iseult by Chrétien de Troyes.
• The Old French romances André de France and Gui d'Excideuil
• Hryggjarstykki, a Norse saga about almost contemporary Norwegian kings written around 1140.
• Skjöldunga saga, a Norse saga on the legendary Danish dynasty of the Skjöldungs, composed c. 1180–1200
• Gauks saga Trandilssonar, a lost saga of the Icelanders.^[35]
• Life of Despot Stefan Lazarević is a work first written in 1166 but the only surviving chronicle is from 1431 by Constantine of Kostenets who includes a genealogy of the Nemanjić dynasty up until Despot Stefan Lazarević.
• William of Tyre's Gesta orientalium principum, a history of the Islamic world^[36]

13th century

• The literary tradition of the Nizari Ismailis ("Assassins"), partially destroyed during the rign of Hassan III of Alamut, and eventually lost completely during the Mongol campaign against the Nizaris, in particular during the burning of the Library of Alamut Castle
  • Sargudhasht-i Bābā Sayyidinā (Persian: سرگذشت بابا سیدنا), Hasan Sabbah's biography. Juvayni "saved" it before burning the library, and used it as a source in his Tarikh-i Jahangushay, but he claimed that he burned it after reading it.^[37]

14th century

• Inventio Fortunata. A 14th-century description of the geography of the North Pole.
• Itinerarium. A geography book by Jacobus Cnoyen of 's-Hertogenbosch, cited by Gerardus Mercator
• Res gestae Arturi britanni (The Deeds of Arthur of Britain). A book cited by Jacobus Cnoyen
• Of the Wreched Engendrynge of Mankynde, Origenes upon the Maudeleyne, and The book of the Leoun. Three works by Geoffrey Chaucer.
• The Coventry Mystery Plays, a cycle of which only two plays survive.
• Carostavnik or Rodoslov. Old Serbian biography enters a new—historiographic or even chronographic—phase with the appearance of the so-called Vita, better yet "Lives of Serbian Kings and Archbishops" by Danilo II, Serbian Archbishop formerly Abbot of the Hilandar Monastery and his successors, most of whom remained anonymous.
• Vrhobreznica Chronicle originates in 1371 but the work is not transcribed until two and half centuries later by a writer named Gavrilo, a hermit, who collected earlier annals in his redaction composed in 1650 at the Vrhobreznica monastery. Part of a manuscript archived as Prague Museum #29 (together with Vrhobreznica Genealogy).
• Koporin Chronicle – a 1371 chronicle transcribed in 1453 by Damjan, a deacon, who also wrote the annals on the order of Archbishop of Zeta, Josif, at the Koporin monastery.
• Studenica Chronicle – a 14th century chronicle from 1350–1400. Oldest survived copy in a 16th-century manuscript, together with a younger annals.
• Cetinje Chronicle covers events from 14th century until the end of 16th century, though the manuscript collection is from the end of the 16th century.

15th century

• Yongle Encyclopedia (永乐大典; 永樂大典; Yǒnglè Dàdiǎn; 'The Great Canon [or Vast Documents] of the Yongle Era'). It was one of the world's earliest, and the then-largest, encyclopaedia commissioned by the Yongle Emperor of China's Ming dynasty in 1403, completed about 1408. About 400 volumes (less than 4%) of a 16th-century manuscript set survive today.^[38]
• François Villon's poem "The Romance of the Devil's Fart."

16th century

• Nigramansir. A Moral Interlude and a Pithy. by John Skelton. Printed 1504. A copy seen in 1759 in Chichester has since vanished.
• Ur-Hamlet. An earlier version of the William Shakespeare play Hamlet. Some scholars believe it to be a lost work written by Thomas Kyd, while others attribute it to Shakespeare, identifying the Ur-Hamlet with the first quarto text.^[39]
• Love's Labour's Won, play by William Shakespeare.^[40]
• The Ocean’s Love to Cynthia. A poem by Sir Walter Raleigh of which only fragments are known.^[41]
• Luís de Camões' philosophic work The Parnasum of Luís Vaz is lost.^[42]
• The Isle of Dogs (1597), a play by Thomas Nashe and Ben Jonson.^[43]
• Phaethon, a play by Thomas Dekker, mentioned in Philip Henslowe's diary, 1597.^[44]
• Hot Anger Soon Cold a play by Henry Chettle, Henry Porter and Ben Jonson; mentioned in Philip Henslowe's diary, August 1598.^[45]
• The Stepmother's Tragedy, a play by Henry Chettle and Thomas Dekker; mentioned in Philip Henslowe's diary, August 1599.^[46]
• Black Bateman of the North, Part II, a play by Henry Chettle and Robert Wilson; mentioned in Henslowe's diary in April 1598.^[47]
• Only four Maya codices survived the Spanish conquest; most were destroyed by conquistadors or the Roman Catholic Church.

17th century

• The History of Cardenio, play by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher (1613)^[48]
• Keep the Widow Waking, play by John Ford and John Webster (1624)
• Claudio Monteverdi composed at least eighteen operas, but only three (L'Orfeo, L'incoronazione di Poppea, and Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria) and the famous aria, Lamento, from his second opera L'Arianna have survived.
• Lost haikus of Ihara Saikaku.
• Jean Racine's first play, Amasie (1660) is lost.
• John Milton wrote nearly two acts of a tragedy called Adam Unparadiz'd, which was then lost.^[49]
• Lost works of Molière:
  • A translation of De Rerum Natura by Lucretius.
  • Le Docteur amoureux (play, 1658)
  • Gros-René, petit enfant (play, 1659)
  • Le Docteur Pédant (play, 1660)
  • Les Trois Docteurs (play, ca. 1660)
  • Gorgibus dans le sac (play, 1661)
  • Le Fagotier (play, 1661)
  • Le Fin Lourdaut (play attributed, 1668)
• Lost works of Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh include;
  • Ughdair Ereann. Fragments survive
• Works by Buhurizade Mustafa Itri, a major Ottoman musician, composer, singer and poet, who is known to have composed more than a thousand works, only forty of which survive to the present.
• Olympica, René Descartes' youthful account of dreams and their interpretations was last excerpted by Leibnitz in 1675.^[50]

18th century

• All poems and literary works by Carlo Gimach, except for the cantata Applauso Genetliaco, are believed to be lost.^[51]
• Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's journal was burnt by her daughter on the grounds that it contained much scandal and satire.
• Edward Gibbon burned the manuscript of his History of the Liberty of the Swiss.
• Adam Smith had most of his manuscripts destroyed shortly before his death. In his last years he had been working on two major treatises, one on the theory and history of law and one on the sciences and arts. The posthumously published Essays on Philosophical Subjects (1795) probably contain parts of what would have been the latter treatise.^[52]
• The Green-Room Squabble or a Battle Royal between the Queen of Babylon and the Daughter of Darius, a 1756 play by Samuel Foote, is lost.
• Numerous works by J. S. Bach, notably at least two large-scale Passions and many cantatas (see List of Bach cantatas) are lost.
• Mozart's Cello Concerto in F and Trumpet Concerto are lost.
• Beethoven's 1793 'Ode to Joy', which was later incorporated into his ninth Symphony
• Haydn's "Double Bass Concerto", of which only the first two measures survive; the rest were burned and destroyed. Supposedly a copy of it may exist somewhere, according to many different speculations.
• Personal letters between George Washington and his wife Martha Washington; all but three destroyed by Mrs. Washington after his death in 1799.^[53]

19th century

• Aaron Burr's farewell address to the senate in 1805 has been lost, though the general outlines are known through contemporaneous comments.^[54]
• Memoirs of Lord Byron, destroyed by his literary executors led by John Murray on 17 May 1824. The decision to destroy Byron's manuscript journals, which was opposed only by Thomas Moore, was made in order to protect his reputation. The two volumes of memoirs were dismembered and burnt in the fireplace at Murray's office.^[55]
• The Scented Garden by Sir Richard Francis Burton, a manuscript of a new translation from Arabic of The Perfumed Garden, was burned by his widow, Lady Isabel Burton née Arundel, along with other papers.
• A large number of manuscripts and longer poems by William Blake were burnt soon after his death by Mr. Frederick Tatham.
• Parts two and three of Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol, burned by Gogol at the instigation of the priest Father Matthew Konstantinovskii.^[56]
• At least four complete volumes and around seven pages of text are missing from Lewis Carroll's thirteen diaries, destroyed by his family for reasons frequently debated.
• The son of the Marquis de Sade had all of de Sade's unpublished manuscripts burned after de Sade's death in 1814; this included the immense multi-volume work Les Journées de Florbelle.^[57]
• A large section of the manuscript for Mary Shelley's Lodore was lost in the mail to the publisher, and Shelley was forced to rewrite it.
• Gerard Manley Hopkins burned all his early poetry on entering the priesthood.
• In the Suspiria de Profundis of Thomas De Quincey, 18 of 32 pieces have not survived.
• Alexander Ivanovich Galich's completed manuscripts Universal Rights and Philosophy of Human History were destroyed in a fire, an event the grieved Galich did not long survive.
• Margaret Fuller's manuscript on the history of the 1849 Roman Republic was lost in the 1850 shipwreck in which Fuller herself, her husband and her child perished. In Fuller's own estimation, as well as of others who saw it, this work, based on her first-hand experience in Rome, might have been her most important work.
• A schoolmate of Arthur Rimbaud claimed that he lost a notebook of poems by the famous poet, the "Cahier Labarrière", which reportedly contained about 60 poems (if true, and if all were distinct from his known verse poems, this would represent about as much in volume).^[58] Paul Verlaine also mentioned a text called "La Chasse spirituelle", claiming it to be Rimbaud's masterpiece, which was never found (although a fake was published in 1949).
• The first draft of Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution: A History was sent to John Stuart Mill, whose maid mistakenly burned it, forcing Carlyle to rewrite it from scratch.
• Joseph Smith's translation of the Book of Lehi from the Mormon Golden Plates was either hidden, destroyed, or modified by Lucy Harris, the wife of transcriber Martin Harris. Whatever their fate, the pages were not returned to Joseph Smith and declared "lost." Smith did not recreate the translation.^[59]
• Isle of the Cross, Herman Melville's followup to the unsuccessful Pierre was rejected by his publishers and has subsequently been lost.
• Robert Louis Stevenson burned his first completed draft of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde after his wife criticized the work. Stevenson wrote and published a revised version.^[60]
• Abraham Lincoln's Lost Speech, given on May 29, 1856, in Bloomington, Illinois. Traditionally regarded as lost because it was so engaging that reporters neglected to take notes, the speech is believed to have been an impassioned condemnation of slavery.^[61]
• L. Frank Baum's theatre in Richburg, New York burned to the ground. Among the manuscripts of Baum's original plays known to have been lost are The Mackrummins, Matches (which was being performed the night of the fire), The Queen of Killarney, Kilmourne, or O'Connor's Dream, and the complete musical score for The Maid of Arran, which survives only in commercial song sheets, which include six of the eight songs and no instrumental music.
• Leon Trotsky describes the loss of an unfinished play manuscript (a collaboration with Sokolovsky) in his My Life, end of chapter 6 (sometime between 1896 and 1898).^[62]
• The Poor Man and the Lady. Thomas Hardy's first novel (1867) was never published. After rejection by several publishers, he destroyed the manuscript.
• George Gissing abandoned many novels and destroyed the incomplete manuscripts. He also completed at least three novels which went unpublished and have been lost.^[63]
• John P. Marquand wrote an early novel called Yellow Ivory in collaboration with his friend W.A. Macdonald.^[64]
• During the many years of his career, Mark Twain produced a vast number of pieces, of which a considerable part, especially in his earlier years, was published in obscure newspapers under a great variety of pen names, or not published at all. Joe Goodman, who had been Twain's editor when he worked at the Virginia City, Nevada, "Territorial Enterprise", declared in 1900 that Twain wrote some of the best material of his life during his "Western years" in the late 1860s, but most of it was lost.^[65] In addition, many of Twain's speeches and lectures have been lost or were never written down. Researchers continue to seek this material, some of which was rediscovered as recently as 1995.
• Although frequently referenced in the Oxford English Dictionary and traceable in several catalogues of libraries and booksellers, no copy of the 1852 book Meanderings of Memory by Nightlark could be tracked down.^[66]
• The Reverend Francis Kilvert's diaries were edited and censored, possibly by his widow, after his death in 1879. In the 1930s, the surviving diaries were passed on to William Plomer, who transcribed them, before returning the originals to Kilvert's closest living relative, a niece, who destroyed most of the manuscripts. Plomer's own transcription was destroyed in the Blitz. He only learned of the originals' destruction when he planned to publish a complete edition in the 1950s.
• Jean Sibelius's Karelia Music was destroyed after its premiere in 1893. What survives today fully are the Karelia Ouverture and the Karelia Suite. Most of the music was reconstructed in 1965 by Kalevi Kuosa, from the original parts that had survived. The parts that hadn't survived were those of the violas, cellos, and double basses. Based on Kuosa's transcription, the Finnish composers Kalevi Aho and Jouni Kaipainen have individually reconstructed the complete music to Karelia Music.
• The musical score to Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1871 opera Thespis has been mostly lost with only 3 musical passages being known to survive.^[67]
• Nathaniel Hawthorne's Seven Tales of my Native Land was personally destroyed after being rejected by publishers.^[68]

20th century

• James Joyce's play A Brilliant Career (which he burned) and the first half of his novel Stephen Hero. His grandson Stephen later burned Nora Joyce's letters to James as well.
• J. Meade Falkner left an almost complete fourth and last novel on a train and felt he was too old to start again.
• A number of Scott Joplin's compositions have been lost, including his first opera, A Guest of Honor.^[69]
• Various parts of Daniel Paul Schreber's "Memoirs of My Nervous Illness" (original German title "Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken") (1903) were destroyed by his wife and doctor Flesching for protecting his reputation, which was mentioned by Sigmund Freud as highly important in his essay "The Schreber Case" (1911).
• L. Frank Baum wrote four novels for adults that were never published and disappeared: Our Married Life and Johnson (1912), The Mystery of Bonita (1914), and Molly Oodle (1915). Baum's son claimed that Baum's wife burned these, but this was after being cut out of her will. Evidence that Baum's publisher received these manuscripts survives. Also lost are Baum's 1904 short stories "Mr. Rumple's Chill" and "Bess of the Movies", as well as his early plays Kilmourne, or O'Connor's Dream (opened April 4, 1883) and The Queen of Killarney (1883).
• In 1907, August Strindberg destroyed a play, The Bleeding Hand, immediately after writing it. He was in a bad mood at the time and commented in a letter that the piece was unusually harsh, even for him.
• "Text I" of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a 250,000-word manuscript by T. E. Lawrence lost at Reading railway station in December 1919.
• In 1922, a suitcase with almost all of Ernest Hemingway's work to date was stolen from a train compartment at the Gare de Lyon in Paris, from his wife. It included a partial World War I novel.
• The novels Tobold and Theodor by Robert Walser are lost, possibly destroyed by the author, as is a third, unnamed novel. (1910–1921)
• The original version of Ultramarine by Malcolm Lowry was stolen from his publisher's car in 1932, and the author had to reconstruct it.
• Jean Sibelius burned his unfinished 8th Symphony and several of his unfinished works in the 1920s
• Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi quotes extensively from Richard Wright's travel diaries in 1935/6. Following Wright's death they have become 'lost'.
• In 1938 George Orwell wrote Socialism and War, an "anti-war pamphlet" for which he could not find a publisher. Although many previously unknown letters and other documents relating to Orwell have been discovered in recent years, no trace of this pamphlet has yet come to light. With the beginning of World War II Orwell's views on pacifism were to change radically, so he may well have destroyed the manuscript.
• Lost papers and a possible unfinished novel by Isaac Babel, confiscated by the NKVD, May 1939.^[70]
• Manuscript of Efebos, a novel by Karol Szymanowski, destroyed in bombing of Warsaw, 1939.
• Five volumes of poetry and a drama, all in manuscript, by Saint-John Perse were destroyed at his house outside Paris soon after he had gone into exile in the summer of 1940. The diplomat Alexis Léger (Perse's real name) was a well-known and uncompromising anti-Nazi and his house was raided by German troops. The works had been written during his diplomat years, but Perse had decided not to publish any new writing until he had retired from diplomacy.
• Walter Benjamin had a completed manuscript in his suitcase when he fled France and arrest by the Nazis in the summer of 1940. He committed suicide in Portbou, Spain on September 26, 1940, and the suitcase and its contents disappeared.
• There are reports that Bruno Schulz worked on a novel called The Messiah, but no trace of this manuscript survived his death (1942).
• Margot Frank's diary was never found (1944). Of The Diary of Anne Frank, the original volume or volumes covering the period between December 1942 and December 1943 was never found, and assumed to have been taken by the Nazis who raided the hiding place. This period is only known from the version Anne rewrote for preservation - which is known to have been in many ways different from her original.^[71]
• The novel In Ballast to the White Sea by Malcolm Lowry, lost in a fire in 1945.
• The novel Wanderers of Night and poems of Daniil Andreev were destroyed in 1947 as "anti-Soviet literature" by the MGB.
• Some pages of William Burroughs's original version of Naked Lunch were stolen.
• Three early, unpublished novels by Philip K. Dick written in the 1950s are no longer extant: A Time for George Stavros, Pilgrim on the Hill, and Nicholas and the Higs.
• In 1958, while working on the last chapter, William H. Gass' novel Omensetter's Luck was stolen off of his desk, forcing him to begin from scratch.
• The manuscript for Sylvia Plath's unfinished second novel, provisionally titled Double Exposure, or Double Take, written 1962–63, disappeared some time before 1970.
• Venedikt Yerofeyev's novel Dmitry Shostakovich was in a bag with two bottles of fortified wine that was stolen from him in a commuter train in 1972.
• Several pages of the original screenplay for Werner Herzog's Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes were reportedly thrown out of the window of a bus after one of his football teammates threw up on them.
• The screenplay for the proposed Dean Stockwell-Herb Berman film After the Gold Rush is reportedly lost.
• Diaries of Philip Larkin – burnt at his request after his death on 2 December 1985. Other private papers were kept, contrary to his instructions.
• The fourth novel of Sasha Sokolov have been lost when the Greek house where it was written burnt down in the second half the 1980s.
• Jacob M. Appel's first novel manuscript, Paste and Cover, was in the trunk of an automobile that was stolen in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1998. The vehicle was recovered, but the manuscript was not.^[72]

21st century

• Terry Pratchett's unfinished works were destroyed in 2017 after his death, fulfilling his last will; his computer hard drive containing his unfinished works was deliberately squished by a steamroller.^[73][74][75]

Lost literary collections

• Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang (3rd century BCE) had most previously existing books burned when he consolidated his power. See Burning of books and burying of scholars.
• The Library of Alexandria, the largest library in existence during antiquity, was destroyed at some point in time between the Roman and Muslim conquests of Alexandria.
• Aztec emperor Itzcoatl (ruled 1427/8-1440) ordered the burning of all historical Aztec codices in an effort to develop a state-sanctioned Aztec history and mythology.
• During the Dissolution of the Monasteries, many monastic libraries were destroyed. Worcester Abbey had 600 books at the time of the dissolution. Only six of them have survived intact to the present day. At the abbey of the Augustinian Friars at York, a library of 646 volumes was destroyed, leaving only three surviving books. Some books were destroyed for their precious bindings, others were sold off by the cartload, including irreplaceable early English works. It is believed that many of the earliest Anglo-Saxon manuscripts were lost at this time.

"A great nombre of them whych purchased those supertycyous mansyons, resrved of those lybrarye bokes, some to serve theyr jakes [i.e., as toilet paper], some to scoure candelstyckes, and some to rubbe their bootes. Some they solde to the grossers and soapsellers..." — John Bale, 1549

• Many works of Anglo-Saxon literature, mostly unique and unpublished, were burned when a fire broke out in the Cotton library at Ashburnham House on 23 October 1731. Luckily, the only surviving manuscript of Beowulf survived the fire and was printed for the first time in 1815.
• In 1193, the Nalanda University was sacked by^[76] Bakhtiyar Khilji.^[77] The burning of the library continued for several months and "smoke from the burning manuscripts hung for days like a dark pall over the low hills."^[78]
• The sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols.
• At least 27 Maya codices were ceremonially destroyed by Diego de Landa (1524–1579), bishop of Yucatán, on 12 July 1562.
• The library of the Hanlin Academy, containing irreplaceable ancient Chinese manuscripts, was mostly destroyed in 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion.^[79]
• The Sikh Reference Library in Amritsar, a collection of rare books, newspapers, manuscripts, and other literary works related to Sikhism and India, was looted and incinerated by Indian troops during the 1984 Operation Blue Star. The missing literature has not been recovered to this day and are presumbed to be lost.^{[80][81][82][83][84][85]} The library hosted a vast collection of an estimated 20,000 literary works just before the destruction, including 11,107 books, 2,500 manuscripts, newspaper archives, historical letters, documents/files, and others.^[86]
• During the 2014 unrest in Bosnia and Herzegovina, sections of the National Archives in Sarajevo were set on fire. Large numbers of historical documents were lost, many of them dating from the 1878–1918 Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the interwar period, and the 1941–1945 rule of the Independent State of Croatia. About 15,000 files from the 1996–2003 Human Rights Chamber for Bosnia and Herzegovina were also destroyed.