the book collector
by publisher William Ponsonby to Spenser’s Complaints (1591) all make reference to a series of works by Spenser, some of which have survived, many of which, however, have subsequently been lost, or never existed in the first place. The commissioner of the false spines at Mount Stewart was well aware of this and the Spenser spines make reference to ‘lost’ works drawn from these three sources. Spenser’s ‘nine Englishe Commoedies’ are known only from reference made to them in the Harvey-Spenser Letters . Likewise, the Epithalamion Thamesis is unknown save for Harvey’s mention of it. Purgatory , Sennight’s Slumber and The Hell of Lovers are similarly lost, the only reference to them found in the publisher’s preface to the 1591 Complaints , whilst The Court of Cupid , the Dreams and the English Poet are known only from the Shepherd’s Calendar . The clever and subtle self-referential theme of populating the fake shelves with lost works finds its best expression, however, in the selection of works of the Ancient philosophers. Fifty authors and works are identifiable from the surviving spines and in every case those authors or the works cited are lost or known to us only from fragments or from references in later authors. The false li- brary contains a series of works by wholly mythical authors. The Opera Chirurgica of Podalirius, the brother of Machaon, both leg- endary healers, sits alongside the Poetica of Orpheus, the legendary musician, poet, and prophet of ancient Greek myth. Subtler still are the references to known works of antiquity lost to scholarship. Hesiod’s Heroogony, Aegimius , and the Astronomia , for example, all appear on the shelves. There are four volumes of The Catalogue of Women , one of the greatest ‘lost’ genealogies, and seven volumes of the Periodos Ges . The majority of the false spines, however, chart the supposed works of authors whose entire output has subsequently been lost, and is known only from references in later sources. En masse the list of authors reads like the Pinakes , Callimachus’s catalogue of the lost library of Alexandria: Pyrrho, Antiochus of Ascalon, Archelaus, Arete of Cyrene, Alexinus of Elis, Anaximenes of Miletus, Phaedo of Elis, Polemon, Menedemus of Eretria, Hipparchia of Maroneia, Anacharsis, Democritus, Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus, Saint Pantaenus, Zeno of Citium – hundreds of volumes of the lost texts
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