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?
In proper libraries, we probably have the author and title in a database somewhere but not the content. In private collections, all bets are off.
I guess the community of private collectors might have (doesn’t have to be institutionalized, centralized nor digital, just the fact of knowing is enough) as a group some kind of grasp on who has what. But is that fact known?
Collections might have been inherited over generations. For some of them, the current owners may not have much interest in what they have and therefore not be aware of some rare copies.
Yes, for sure. But then that’s a “lost cache”. Similar to the works we’ll find in a few years buried somewhere under the ground. But what about “active collections”?