This is the first post in a new regular column called “Speaking of…,” in which New Yorkers weigh in on the most pressing hypothetical questions of our time.

 

It’s a tantalizing prospect.

A forgotten storage unit packed with brittle plastic bags, obsolete electronics, and other ephemera. The lock is cut. And there in the muted light, amidst the overstuffed boxes, sits the long-rumored work of a literary legend. Proof copy. Yellowed but intact and ready for the printer.

Of course, that isn’t quite how Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman was unearthed last summer and announced to the world earlier this year, with great fanfare followed by even greater controversy. Found by Lee’s lawyer, the novel is the sequel and, in the author’s words, “parent” to her singular To Kill a Mockingbird, first published in 1960.

The work’s belated rediscovery treats readers to a simple and powerful fantasy: the chance for one final encounter with the words and world of an author who, due to death or reasons more personal, had put down the pen.

Because the best fantasies deserve indulging, I decided to ask a few New York City book lovers what other writers they wish had left behind secret manuscripts of their own.

For some readers, like Thomas DeWitt, a sales associate at the Upper East Side’s Shakespeare & Co. Booksellers, the best possible scenario reunites a storied partnership—with a twist.

“I would love to see Marv Wolfman and George Pérez do another one of Teen Titans, but using the classic team,” says DeWitt.

In the 1980s, the comic book duo found success with The New Teen Titans, their reboot of an earlier series from the ’60s by different creators. It’s the inaugural cast of teenage superheroes that DeWitt finds more compelling, though, and he’s curious how that particular team’s unexplored transition to adulthood might look in Wolfman and Pérez’s hands.

Megan Reid, an associate editor at Emily Bestler Books/Simon & Schuster, looks back at a writer beloved from her childhood, Madeline L’Engle. “Every time I walked by St. John the Divine on the Upper West Side, where she was a librarian and had an office, I’d fantasize about meeting her just once and telling her how much she meant to me.”

What appeals more to Reid, though, isn’t the Time Quintet novels—which includes A Wrinkle in Time—but the less widely read Austin Family series. “She’s kind of a goody two-shoes and is annoyingly popular with boys,” Reid says of L’Engle’s heroine, “but I’d trade a lot to have just twenty more pages with Vicky Austin.”

Logan Ragsdale, manager of the Broadway branch of the Queens Public Library System, reflects somberly on the absences of David Foster Wallace and Spalding Gray, two authors profoundly affected by depression: “I really regret that they died at such an early age.”

The work that survives both authors, Ragsdale considers, is heavily influenced by their illnesses. “Their writing was so based on their minds just spinning out of control.” For readers like Ragsdale, a rediscovered Wallace or Gray volume might even represent a kind of triumph over affliction, a new chapter in stories that ended too soon.

But in the buyback department at the Strand Book Store, an associate named Billy tells me he doesn’t quite the see the point in this sort of daydreaming.

“When I find an author I like, I tend to slow down on reading through their works, so that I won’t run out.”

This approach has a certain practical beauty in it—a recognition that there is, after all, an end. By acknowledging that every creative mind has limits and every creative life must come to a close, we might better treasure what we already have.

.

 David Speer is a writer and performer based in New York City.