Adam Smyth is Professor of English Literature and the History of the Book at Balliol College, Oxford University. He recently published a fascinating article listing projects that he describes as “abandoned or failed” – making him the perfect guest! You can read his work at adamsmyth.substack.com.

We talk (among other things) about why the list might be the ultimate form for unfinished work, about not finding what you’re looking for in archives, and about why we’re so desperate to claim that projects aren’t ever really abandoned.

Adam works mainly on early modern writing and its material forms. Right now he's editing Periclesfor Arden Shakespeare, and writing a trade book about the biography of important makers of books. Adam is also the co-editor, with Gill Partington and Simon Morris, of a new journal about material texts, called Inscription, which you can find here: https://inscriptionjournal.com/how-to-buy/.

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Unfinished/Unpublished celebrates creative projects that never got finished, that have yet to be finished, or that never made it out into the world. I ask my guests to search their bottom drawers and the abandoned corners of their laptops to rediscover secret and incomplete schemes.

If you have an unfinished or unpublished project you’d like to talk about, email me at [email protected]

Or, follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TrueBagglerag