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Are there any "text caches" that we still are not sure what's inside? (en.wikipedia.org)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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In 1345 he personally discovered a collection of Cicero's letters not previously known to have existed, the collection Epistulae ad Atticum, in the Chapter Library (Biblioteca Capitolare) of Verona Cathedral

So basically a guy goes into a library, rummages for a while, and finds ~1400 years old text no one knew was there

Do we still have places that store texts (like libraries, but doesn't have to strictly be a library) where we don't have everything catalogued and we don't know what might be inside?

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[–] 6 points 1 year ago (10 children)

I would assume that every serious collector of books, everybody who has more than a few shelves full, has not read all of them.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    🤔 Isn't reading them the point of collecting?
    You seriously made me wonder :D

    But still, even if they don't read them, they know they have them. So the collector and the seller know that such book exists and is somewhere out there and the owner knows they have such title in their stash

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    the collector and the seller know

    So you have never bought or inherited an old collection - large boxes rather than single books? "Going to sort them later..." :)

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    No :D

    But then my question is, do we feel there are a lot of such collections? Or rather not?

    To rephrase a little bit:
    "Are there places where someone could pull off another Petrarch today?"

    • yes
    • no
    • a few
    • a lot
    • only in Africa (see the answer in AskHistorians)
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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    only in Africa (see the answer in AskHistorians)

    While my answer was related to Africa, as that's where I'm most familiar with a paucity of study and an excess of material, I'd bet even money that there are plenty of other non-European (and outside of the Americas) collections that have yet to be fully catalogued, especially in the Islamic World and India. I just couldn't swear to it or name any regions in particular to look into.

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