I'm happy at the moment, because I have been afforded the opportunity to revisit my childhood (1) (2)

I have been on the hunt for some time for a book that I remember from my tender years. The author is Dutch childrens' writer Paul Biegel, and the title is The Seven Times Search and I never actually owned a copy even as a child, only took it out of the library something like nineteen times. Along with Jansson's Moomins it was one of my absolute favourite books ever.

When I came to recall it, some twenty-five years later, it was gone. Out of print, vanished, barely a trace left of it across the whole internet. Even specialists in rare children's books reported only cold spoor and no fresh tracks. I was flabbergasted (3). A book which was a huge landmark of my early years gone almost completely.

It's a frightening thought. A lot of writers are in the game at least partly because they want to leave a legacy, after all. Even fantasy authors such as myself can hope that, after our untimely demise following an argument at a convention over who was supposed to pay for the drinks, our work lives on in the minds and on the shelves of others beyond our immediate circle; the spores of our memes, so to speak, finding fertile ground. But I know full well that many of my favourite authors are out of print (4) or, at the very least, painfully obscure where they ought to be household names (imho ofc). The tastes of the mob are fickle. It may well be that there are no unjustly remembered books, but there most certainly are many that are unjustly forgotten.

The classical Athenians had three pre-eminent tragedians, authors of multiple prize-winning works whose names have come down to us through time. Historical sources claim that Aeschylus wrote somewhere in the order of ninety plays, Sophocles as many as a hundred and twenty-three, and Euripides ninety-five. These men were the colossi of dramatic history, men instrumental in transforming religious mysteries into something we would recognise as theatre. So, what has history left us?

Aschylus: seven plays. Sophocles: seven plays. Euripides: Eighteen (plus one disputed one) (5). There are fragments of others that have been recovered from sites such as Oxyrhynchus but seven, seven and eighteen are the tally of complete works. That's around two hundred and eighty plays that are lost or almost completely lost. And then there are all their contemporaries, many of whom have not a single surviving work, and who we know only from chance mentions in other documents, or because Aristophanes (the great comic playwright, most of whose portfolio is likewise lost) was rude about them in one of his own plays.

Well, this once I've triumphed over entropy, and Alibris (on my third search there) turned up a copy of The Seven Times Search and I have it, and I will read it to my son, who won't understand what the fuss is about. It's the self same edition as I recall from the library decads ago. Possibly that's the only English-language edition there ever was.

And the book? Well in brief, it concerns a boy trying to learn his seven times table who makes some unwise declarations, and ends up shrunk to a minute size and lost in his own back garden, doomed forever unless he can learn the maths. Needless to say, he achieves his goal only with the help of the garden's other residents of a similar size, the ants, spiders, woodlice and so on. Twenty-five years of this percolating through my subconscious surely must have contributed to the insect-kinden in some way, and so I pay my tribute to Mr Biegel, three years in his grave now, and give my thanks for a most influential book.

(1) and inflict it on my son, more's the point.

(2) Well, many people eventually get this opportunity, but I'm in the position of being able to enjoy it.

(3) And it's not often I'm that.

(4) Subterranean Press are, joyously, re-releasing Barry Hughart's masterpiece series concerning Master Li and Number Ten Ox, for which angels bless them.

(5) Why does Euripides come off so well, comparatively? Because a monastery somewhere chanced to have a compilation of his plays. Of course, the beginning and the end of the manuscript had perished with the years and conditions, so we're left with Euripides' plays beginning with the (greek) letters E through K. Fortune, all is fortune…