The authors were chosen because both had the right connections with senior editors, publishing houses, and writers, so they could reach out and compose a list of the most infamous unfinished, unpublished, and lost manuscripts. The Hungarian literary scene is closed and guarded, but once you’re within its circles, you just have to ask the right people.

‘Most of these unfinished volumes come from the Communist days,’ Júlia Nagy recounts in her letter. ‘Most of the books we intended to discuss were forbidden items due to their subversive, anti-Communist, or supposedly anarchic content, primarily from the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. This would have been the primary market value of our book, since Communism and its sins is always a hot topic. However, in the early stages of our research a title came up that at first didn’t seem like anything special. It didn’t fit into our sins-of-Communism theme either. Still, we couldn’t disregard it. It was supposedly an amateur book on rural, small-town bands. It just came up over and over again. People kept mentioning it, but no one had actually read it. Then we learned that there was an actual police investigation about the book at the time. Someone disappeared, we understood, and soon we figured out it was the author himself. He vanished. He’s still considered a missing person, maybe he’s legally dead now, I don’t know. It was enough to mark the manuscript as infamous, so we added it to our list as an interesting counterpiece. Then we hit a wall. In most cases you could talk to an editor or a friend who had read the manu­script and could give you an account of it, even if the manuscript itself was lost or destroyed. That wasn’t the case with this one. Although a lot of people had heard about it, the manuscript had never reached the publishers. No editor or editor’s assistant had read even an excerpt. Those who supposedly had weren’t in the business anymore, and we couldn’t track them down. It seemed like they vanished into thin air. I assume they moved abroad, or went underground.’

One day, out of the blue, the problem solved itself.

‘One morning Márton showed up carrying a cardboard box. Inside was a Xeroxed text and a couple of cassette tapes. From the look on his face I knew instantly that it was the book. We had become rather obsessed with it by that time, I must admit.’

‘How did he get hold of it? That’s a good question. Márton never told me. He said he found the box on his doorstep. I think that’s bullshit, manuscripts don’t just appear when you need them. He wanted to play it close to the chest. He always avoided giving a straight answer. Now we’ll never know.’