I could find no record of them having ever even existed. I opened a few of them and found out why. They sucked.
A lot of works that were under-appreciated during their time had their extemporaneous advocates and promoters that had their own motivations that often had little to do with appreciation for the work.
If Kafka's editor had listened to Kafka and burned his works instead of making sure they got on as many bookshelves as possible, or if Van Gogh didn't have the close relationship he had with his art-dealer brother, we almost certainly wouldn't remember their works today.
I don't doubt their are many unknown masters ahead of their time that will forever remain in obscurity.
However, it might be that time actually has a false negative rate of 99.9%. Almost all of the great old books are filtered out by time. In that case, time probably sucks as a filter. But then again, if your only goal is "read only great books," time is still a useful filter even if it has a terrible false negative rate, since it's irrelevant to you that there are lots of other books being excluded, so long as you get a sufficient supply of good books.
>Ernest Hemingway was deeply impressed with Markham's writing, saying "she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But [she] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers ... it really is a bloody wonderful book."
There are bad books nobody liked at time and never again. But when seemingly bad book was popular, then it likely filled some need or said somethig they wanted or needed to hear.
The overall point remains valid, however.
Consider Caxton's Polycronicon printed at the dawn of movable type, circa 1490. An encyclopedia of universal history, it deserves no less a place on the bookshelf than Gawain, Beowulf or the Mabinogian. But few will make reference to it today. Nor the thousands of other lost texts of the period known as the incunabula, the first half-century of transmission via printing press. A time in history that saw an explosion in literacy and design experimentation.
It could be worse - they could be fascinating, but entirely irrelevant to the modern world view.
My dad had a cache of books from a friend of his - that was collected from the pre-independence era for India from 1920s to 1945.
The world in those books were strange - the era looks like nothing like the world from my text books.
The "Great war" had just passed ("between cousins"), there was wistful memories of the Russian empire, of china being conquered by the japanese.
Oil empires in Burma (Burmah-Shell), political deals with the Kings of Siam, health of Austro-Hungarian royal inbreeding.
The shades of gray in which Belgian kings and Cecil Rhodes got painted as conquerors ,liberators and genocidal maniacs in one go.
All the important intellectuals are German (Kant, Hegel ...) or French. The world "lingua franca" was used to describe what English stands for today.
America was busted and fallen down, the economy under Hoover (who was called an "engineer, digging deeper into pockets"). They had poor quality cotton (remember, Indian British books - the Deccan plateau had Cotton too & the empire had Daka muslin) and a "department of war".
Is from such an amazing period of time, after fax machines, aero planes and Einstein, but before anti-biotics and nukes.
But other than as a curiosity, the whole collection has been obsoleted by the 2nd half of the century.
A Roman example--as described in Mary Beard's "SPQR"--is how imperialists claimed Rome was always ruled by kings, attempting to erase its Republican history. Contemporary populations accepted that viewpoint because they didn't have access to history.
They're still relevant.
Frankly, I am grateful for even your cursory summaries.
(1) The pressure and rapidity of publishing - for many authors - means less time spent on individual projects.
(2) Your expectations as a reader partially determine your judgement as to how much value a book has. As your expectations increase...
I understand this to mean that my ever-improving taste might make it seem like, as time goes by, a greater and greater proportion of books seem to be of low quality. However, it works the other way around, too: As people through new generations become ever more easily satisfied with mediocre writing, the need to produce high-quality works decreases. At least, this is what I think is happening with TV.