ghost libraries

Who has been heard we know; they are the well-mapped islands, the rest are the unmappable sea of unheard, unrecorded humanity. (...) The earth is seven-tenth water, but the ratio of silence to voice is far greater. If libraries hold all the stories that have been told, there are ghost libraries of all the storeis that have not. The ghosts outnumber the books by some unimaginably vast sum. (...) 

- A Short History of Silence, in The Mother of All Questions, Rebecca Solnit (2017)