The Catalog of Lost Books: An Annotated and Seriously Addled Collection of Great Books that Should Have Been Written but Never Were

by Tad Tuleja

"IT ALL BEGAN AT A COCKTAIL PARTY, ONE OF THOSE PERRIER AND GOOSE LIVER AFFAIRS….where caustic remarks about Cancun vie with Diderot anecdotes. I was knocking off my third Tequila Sunrise when a fragment of chitchat wafted over my shoulder. 'In terms of sheer facticity, don't you agree that the Rabelaisean oeuvre is still the acme of the genre?' 'If you chaps want the acme of the picaresque,' I heard myself saying with my most professorial mien, 'you're tilling the wrong field. The genre didn't peak until 1845. Myra Quinn. Six Years with a Donkey. Magisterial.'

They stopped cold. They had never heard of Myra Quinn. How could they? I had just made her up."

You've been there! Like everyone with a liberal arts education, you have heard such conversations before—they have plagued your entire adult life! But no more—Tad Tuleja, author of The Cat's Pajamas, has mastered the art of making up literary references that sound so authentically obscure that no one worth his elbow patches would dare disagree when you refer to:
•Guniad by Toto
•The Art of Suffering by Bulimius
•Romance of the Flytrap by Antonanus
•The Art of Giving Offense by Vitelloni
•A Dream of Night by Joanna the Mad
•A Pair of Dice Lost by Ludlow
•The Ill-Tempered Clavier by Stichprober
•The Toddler by Pregfoot and Barenant
•Lord Gout's Legions by Harnsauer
•Moose Noose and Other Poems by Ormand
•Leaps and Excavations by Antonio-Marcos
•Ayuh Speaks by Coles

So if you don't mind dropping names that nobody picks up— The Catalog of Lost Books is the sweetest revenge of all.

201 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Tad Tuleja (b. 1944) is a graduate of Yale, Cornell, and the University of Sussex. He has been a journalist, editor, and researcher, and has authored numerous short-entry reference books. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Reviews

[notgettingenough]

Just a place to keep my great book ideas.

#1:
Look at these pictures:







Princess Di dies. Melbourne man goes beserk. Lindt siege Sydney. All those flowers.

What if all these incidents across the world (and they keep happening) are actually a big plot.
Interflora conspiracy?
Enter InterfloraPol.

It'll pretty much write itself I imagine.

[Keith]

This is humor. Or rather, this is academic humor, which is to say, it is not a laugh riot. If you've never taken a college-level humanities course, there is probably nothing here for you; if you dodged such classes because you hate that stuff, you will likely hate this too. If, like me, you do not hold a graduate degree in some field of the humanities, much of this is likely to soar past without making much of an impression; likewise if you have no memory of late 20th century popular culture. For example, if you can't see why "Marilyn Monroe: A Prolegomena to Semiotics (1959–61)" might be funny, it's probably best to skip this one. Often what actual humor can be found is little more than a page of build up to a bad pun. In German. See, for example, Alfred E. Neumann's "Ich Sollte Mich Sorgen?" or the 1563 work of Heloise Hausenhintsen, "The Helper's Helper," or Hans Langweiler's "The Maid Has Left" [Das Dienstmädchen Hat den Koop Geflieht] of 1838. LOL, right?

But, if you laughed even once in the course of this review, you might just get a bit of entertainment from this slim volume, which could then serve as the perfect adornment for one's toilet tank, as no item herein runs more than about two pages, discounting the woodblock-style illustrations.

[Subsequently edited for typos]

[Cheryl]

I thought this was that book about books made up by fiction authors to serve roles in their novels. It's not. It's just Tuleja jabbing at and riffing off of other academics. The introduction was cute, but I rapidly lost interest in the actual spoof reviews of the invented books.