Lost Books

I recently read Talisman, a graphic novel about Marcie, who has a book she loves as a child, loses it, forgets what it's called, and goes on a quest first to find and then to recreate it, which ends up changing her entire life.

I had multiple books like that. Children tend not to register author names or titles, and I travelled and moved often, including between the US and India, so I might lose a small-press book only published in India and never find it again. Some I have managed to rediscover, while some remain lost.

I have ascertained that Dariba the Good Little Rakshasa, about a kid demon who keeps getting in trouble because he's nice when he's supposed to be wicked, exists but seems unavailable. My most recent rediscovery was Mystery of the Witches Bridge; the beginning of the review explains how it was rediscovered. It was as much of a delight as when I'd first read it.

I used to read a children's magazine, Chandamama, which had a serialized fantasy story which I read in scraps and pieces, as I often missed issues and then found old ones in a friend's house, and so it felt beautiful and dreamlike. It had beautiful illustrations in a classic Indian style. When Lucy reads the story "for the refreshment of the spirit" in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and can then only remember that there was a king and a hill and a cup and a sword, and she'd give anything to be able to read it again, I think of my lost serial: there was a princess and a flying chariot and a Goddess and a lotus and a kingdom in the air, and I'd give anything to be able to read it again.

Another that haunted me was a book of fairytales from many lands. I think they may have been adapted by different authors as they had very different styles. They were more adult than usual. A tale from France had a rose who turned into a man; he raped a woman, felt guilty, and became a rose again. A Scandinavian tale had a young man tending a red bull for three sisters; there was one who was beautiful and seemed kind, but when she parted her hair he saw a third eye in the center of her forehead. He and the bull fled into a blizzard, and I think it was ambiguous whether they survived or not. Another tale, I think from either Africa or New Guinea, had a man and a woman in a boat on the ocean, and they ate yams in three colors, white and purple and black.

No one has ever been able to find this book. I found a fairytale that's similar to the one with the bull, but it's not quite the same story. I sometimes wonder if I dreamed it. But think it was real.

Did you have a lost book? If you found it, did it capture the same magic you felt as a child, or was it disappointing? Did it change your life?