Or even on the shelves of famous libraries - one of my favorite historical finds in recent decades was Deborah Harkness's discovery of John Dee's "Book of Soyga

Or even on the shelves of famous libraries - one of my favorite historical finds in recent decades was Deborah Harkness's discovery of John Dee's "Book of Soyga" (an Elizabethan occult text written in code and thought to have been lost). Turns out it had been sitting on a shelf in the Bodleian Library for centuries, unnoticed and uncatalogued. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Soyga http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Soyga