David Bellos: “Preparing for [a] move in spring 1966, [Perec] stuffed redundant paperwork into a cardboard suitcase intended for the dump, and put his literary papers in a different case of similar appearance. In the move, the wrong case got junked. All of Perec’s manuscripts and typescripts prior to the writing of Things disappeared. The story led me to expect I would never get to read those lost works.”