Paper Survivor

A paper survivor is From the Surviving Record's term for a book whose text is lost but which survives through other people's quotations, references, catalogue entries or other documents that name it. The book itself cannot be read, but the hole it left can be measured.

It is the central idea behind Vanished Texts & Libraries, the category for lost works and the libraries that held them.

The two tests

A work counts as a paper survivor when both of these hold:

• no copy of the work itself is known to survive;
• its existence is recorded somewhere outside it, in a quotation or reference by another writer, an entry in a catalogue or bibliography, or another document that names it.

A text that survives but cannot be understood is not a paper survivor. Its body is still there; what is missing is its meaning, which is a different problem.

What the evidence can show

The records that keep a paper survivor alive say very different amounts. Some preserve only a title. Some describe the work's subject or size. Some quote passages from it, so that fragments of the text itself come down inside other books.

Each entry says which kind of evidence exists for the work in question and states only what that evidence supports. Anything beyond it, such as what the lost text probably contained or why it stopped being copied, is marked by dead reckoning, as explained on the evidence levels page.

An example

The Pinakes is one. The Suda credits the poet and scholar Callimachus with a set of tables of those who stood out in every branch of learning and of what they wrote, in 120 books. The Suda gives the work's title and size, but no copy of the work itself is among the sources this site has read. The entry on the Library of Alexandria mentions it among the questions about how large the collection was, since the library's own catalogue is not there to check any figure against.