Forgotten

We tend to think that books, like cockroaches, will survive the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but they don't. They disappear, not just in the ravages of war like the Great Library of Alexandria, but through simple neglect, and it is our duty to keep fine novels alive.

Christopher Fowler, The Book of Forgotten Authors

Thousands upon thousands of books are published each year, and most of them will never find their way to a shelf at a large Barnes & Noble store or even a large library. And most of the new books that do manage to earn a spot in bookstores and libraries soon enough disappear for good. Merchants and librarians must find places to put all those newer books that are published.

On my last stop at a Barnes & Noble I made a rough count of the books on four shelves of fiction. There were roughly 30 different novels on each shelf, or about 120 books total. I noticed books by just nine authors whom I know to be deceased. These included the likes of Jacqueline Susann,  Jonathan Swift, Williams Styron, Walter Tevis and Leo Tolstoy. So what happened to all the books by writers both living and dead who once would have been on these same shelves?

Christopher Fowler, author of the Bryant & May series of British mysteries, wondered the same thing and decided to do something about it. The result is The Book of Forgotten Authors (2017).

Fowler writes brief essays about 100 writers, mostly novelists, who were once somebody in the literary world. Today few people remember them. I am old enough to remember several, including Charlotte Armstrong, Brian Moore, John Christopher, John Collier, Winifred Watson, Pierre Boulle and a longtime favorite, Jack Finney. Most of the 100 I had never heard of, let alone read. Being British, Fowler focuses mainly on British writers, many of them fairly obscure even at the peak of their careers.

Some names we may not recognize, but we know the books they wrote or the movies based on their books. Boulle, for example, wrote both The Bridge Over the River Kwai and Planet of the Apes, yet his novels were never as popular as the movies based on them.

Fowler cheats a bit, including authors who are not forgotten at all. Several of the authors he mentions still have at least some of their books in print. Publishers wouldn't print books nobody will buy.

One of the lessons of Fowler's intriguing book is that all but a few of authors writing today will also be forgotten within a very few years. Fowler, in fact, lists himself as 101 on his list: "Fowler is still alive and one day plans to realize his ambition to become a Forgotten Author himself."