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."