Academics at Edinburgh's Napier University library have appealed for help from the public - that's you and me - to locate missing copies of a magazine published by Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.
Published in 1917 and 1918 as they recuperated from shell shock at the Craiglockhart War Hospital, The Hydra included wry editorials, hospital news and club reports, offering a welcome escape from the horrors of the war. The journal also published poetry, with regular contributions from Sassoon, along with Owen's first two published poems, 'Song of Songs' and 'The Next War'.
The missing issues are numbers four, five and six, published between February and April 1918. Librarians at Napier University hope that there may be other poems by Owen, written while he was preparing to go back to the front. James Boyle told the BBC that they would "like people who may have had relatives there, or indeed folk may have bought it at the time and left it in the attic, to look for it and get in touch with Napier University".
But what else have you got hiding in the loft? With tapes of Philip Larkin reading his poems turning up in a Hornsea attic, not to mention first editions of Joyce's Ulysses going for up to £100,000 and The Hound of the Baskervilles weighing in at around £80,000, perhaps it's time to get out the flashlight and start looking.
