The Oxford English Dictionary is appealing to the public for help after being unable to trace a mysterious, possibly pornographic, 19th-century book from which a number of its quotations are derived.

Meanderings of Memory, by one "Nightlark", is dated to 1852 by the OED, and appears in 51 entries for the dictionary, including "couchward", "extemporize" and "fringy". Veronica Hurst, the OED's principal bibliographer, said its shadowy existence was discovered when a member of staff was working on the entry for "revirginize", for which Meanderings of Memory is the earliest citation. The quotation taken from the book for the OED is: "Where that cosmetic … Shall e'er revirginize that brow's abuse." But Meanderings of Memory could not be traced in any library catalogue or database, so Hurst was contacted; she expected to track the book down within 10 minutes.

"That turned into half an hour, and I was no further along the line to solving it – I looked on Google Books, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, in short I looked everywhere I could think of and couldn't come up with anything," said Hurst. "We're not usually completely floored, but this time we're stumped."

The only evidence for the book's existence the OED could find was an entry in a bookseller's catalogue, which includes the description: "Written and published by a well-known connoisseur with the epigraph 'Cur potius lacrimae tibi mi Philomela placebant?'"

"We naturally thought the Latin quotation would be a huge clue [but] it's not a quote from anything," said Hurst. "It means, roughly, 'why did my tears please you more, my Philomel?', and Philomela is another name for a nightingale." The book's author, meanwhile, is "Nightlark", she pointed out.

So staff decided to ask the public for help. "It really has captured people's imaginations," said Hurst. "One theory is that it could be pornographic, or in some ways a clandestine publication that didn't get recorded in the normal way … I certainly did incline to the hoax theory – people have made quite a lot of effort from time to time to get into the OED, so maybe a 19th-century Oxford man thought he could fool us."

But a member of the public has since found another mention of Meanderings of Memory, in a Sotheby's catalogue from 1854, and Hurst is now leaning towards the hypothesis that the book could actually be a very small piece of work, possibly poetry, running to just five to 10 pages. "It reads like poetry, it's very flowery," she said, pointing to the citation from Meanderings of Memory for the prefix "re": "O too rebrutalized! oh too bereaved!".

"Some of it sounds ethereal and scholarly poetic, and then suddenly you're down to the ground with an entry like 'lump' – 'I the mattress spread, And equal lay whatever lumps the bed'. Some of them are just a bit funny," she said.

The appeal was opened to the public a week ago, and Hurst is delighted at the interest it has generated – despite the fact that no one has yet tracked down the book. "It shows we were justified in giving up here for a bit, and asking the world for help," she said.