Kerouac did not type the draft on ordinary sheets of paper, but on a scroll. Before sitting down to type, Kerouac made the scroll by cutting 20-inch-wide lengths of tracing paper into narrower 9-inch strips that fitted into his typewriter. He then pasted them together into 12-foot-long reels of paper so that once he had started, he did not have to stop, just type. The spontaneous outburst of creativity and unrevised rhythm was fuelled only, Kerouac said, by coffee.

Kerouac typed fast. He said he “went fast because the road is fast”. 100-plus words a minute. He finished the draft in 20 days. On the first day he typed 12,000 words, and, on the last, 15,000.

The original scroll

In the published novel, there are paragraph breaks. In the scroll, there are none. The writer could not stop to press the key, would not risk slowing his breathless prose. The scroll contains the real names of the author’s friends, not the names used later in the published book; Cassady became Dean Moriarty, the poet Allen Ginsberg is Carlo Marx, and Kerouac himself was reborn as Sal Paradise.

The scroll is almost 120 feet long. It looks like a road and a journey in itself. However, the end of the scroll, containing Kerouac’s original ending, is missing. At the current end is a handwritten note from Kerouac that says: “DOG ATE [Potchky-a dog]“. Potchky was a cocker spaniel owned by Kerouac’s friend Lucien Carr. Nobody knows how much longer the scroll was before Potchky sank his teeth into it.

If indeed he did.

Some say that Kerouac disliked his original conclusion and tore off the end of the scroll. Some say he didn’t have an ending. Allen Ginsberg wrote a letter to Neal Cassady on 7 May 1951, less than two weeks after Kerouac completed the scroll: “The writing is dewlike, everything happens as it really did, with the same juvenescent feel of spring: the hero is you, you are the hero, beginning with appearance on scene 1946. Jack needs, however, an ending.”

The ending we now have is elegiac, with a profound sense of the irretrievability of times past.”Nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty, I think of Dean Moriarty.” (You can hear Kerouac himself read the ending of the book here.)

The scroll, now a little brittle round the edges, was sold at Christie’s in May 2001, fifty years after it was typed. The seller was the nephew of Kerouac’s third wife, Stella, to pay inheritance taxes. The buyer, James Irsay, the owner of the Indianapolis Colts, paid $2.43m for one of the most iconic, but partially lost, manuscripts of the twentieth century.

* Photo used courtesy of a creative commons licence from Thomas Hawk.

Lowry’s first novel, Ultramarine, appeared in 1933 when he was 24 years old. Contrary to popular belief, Lowry did not leave the manuscript of this first novel in a taxi. The manuscript was stolen, yes, but it was in a briefcase taken from the convertible car of the publisher’s editor, Ian Parsons. Lowry alleged that he was forced to re-write the entire work in a matter of weeks because of this loss, but a carbon copy existed, supplied by his friend, Martin Case, who had typed the final manuscript then kept the carbon copy which Lowry had chucked in the bin.

Ultramarine tells the story of a young man growing up during a voyage to the Far East — so far, so autobiographical. Ultramarine was not a commercial success; Lowry was accused of plagiarism and he spent much of the rest of his life trying to suppress the book.*

After Ultramarine appeared, Lowry began travelling through Europe with his friend and mentor Conrad Aiken, got married to the writer Jan Gabrial in Paris, and, in 1935, began a novel called In Ballast to the White Sea.

Albert Finney as Geoffrey Firmin in the 1984 film of Under the Volcano

Also in 1935, Lowry moved to New York. He had begun a deep and meaningful relationship with alcohol at an early age, and this relationship continued while he and Jan moved to Los Angeles, then Mexico. In Mexico, Lowry began what would turn out to be his masterpiece, Under the Volcano — the work of genius that the alcoholic sobered up long enough to write.

By 1937, Lowry’s drinking caused Jan to leave him, and he was jailed, then deported from Mexico in July 1938. In Los Angeles, he met Margerie Bonner, an aspiring writer and former silent-film child star. When Lowry moved to Canada after his American visa expired, Bonner followed him. They were married in December 1940. For the next 14 years, they lived as squatters in a cabin without plumbing or electricity at Dollarton, up-inlet from Vancouver.

The cabin was an isolated place. The Lowrys had little money, apart from Lowry’s life-long allowance from his father. In 1944, their house burned down, immolating almost everything they owned, including what had become a 1,000-page draft of In Ballast to the White Sea, nine years of literary labour, which Lowry never re-wrote.

In February 1956, Lowry and Margie came to live in another seaside town: Ripe, on the south coast of England. They were not happy. When Lowry threatened Margerie with a broken bottle (she said), she fled. She returned to the house on the morning of 27 June 1957 to find Lowry dead from an overdose of sleeping pills.

In a nice twist on the planet of lost manuscripts, before T.E. Lawrence burned his personal library, he saved the books he liked. One of these was a relatively unknown seafaring novel called Ultramarine. What would T.E. have made of the truly disappeared In Ballast to the White Sea? An early draft of the novel has turned up in Jan Gabrial’s papers since her death, but the Dollarton manuscript has gone forever.

* Lowry was accused of plagiarising Nordahl Grieg’s The Ship Sails On, published by Knopf in translation from the original Norwegian in 1927. Lowry actually admitted in a letter to Grieg in 1938 that “Much of Ultramarine is paraphrase, plagiarism, or pastiche from you.” See: Harvey Breit and Margerie Bonner Lowry (Eds.) The Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowry, London, 1967, p16.

Sylvia Plath

During the last months of her life, Plath found her Ariel voice and wrote the poems that confirmed her reputation, including Lady Lazarus, Daddy, and Edge. She also, as she had done since she was a child, kept her journal. One volume of these journals, like the novel, “disappeared”. Another volume was destroyed. Of the disappeared journals, Hughes wrote: “Two more notebooks survived for a while… The last of these contained entries for several months, and I destroyed it because I did not want her children to have to read it… The other disappeared.”

The 1962 notebook and a typescript. Both “disappeared”. What does that mean? As Plath and Hughes were still married at the time of her death, and she died without a will, Hughes became the heir to Plath’s estate, and all her belongings. Over the years, he was often accused of withholding certain papers, just as he had burned the journal.

Ronald Hayman, in The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath, says that Judith Kroll saw an outline of the novel, titled Doubletake and later, Double Exposure. Like so much of Plath’s work, the writing had its origins in biography. Hughes had begun an affair with Assia Wevill while Plath was in Devon, and his infidelity hurt her bitterly. Plath wrote to a friend that the novel was “semi-autobiographical about a wife whose husband turns out to be a deserter and philanderer”.

There are rumours about the disappeared manuscript. It’s been said that Esther Greenwood, the protagonist of Plath’s much-loved novel, The Bell Jar, turns up again in Double Exposure. It’s been said that the rare books department at Smith College in Massachusetts, where Plath studied, has a secret copy of the typescript under seal. Plath’s mother, Aurelia, also claimed that her daughter had told her about the book, while Plath’s husband accused Aurelia (after Aurelia was safely dead) of stealing it: “Her mother said she saw a whole novel, but I never knew about it. What I was aware of was sixty, seventy pages which disappeared. And to tell you the truth, I always assumed her mother took them all.”

Missing Plath novels do turn up occasionally. In 1999, a team working in special collections at Emory University in Georgia, which acquired the library of Ted Hughes, discovered two chapters of an early novel called Falcon Yard. Falcon Yard is the place in Cambridge where, in 1956, Plath met (and, famously, bit) Hughes. The novel would have fictionalised their life together. It was never completed.

The draft of Double Exposure may have been destroyed; it may have been stolen; it may have been lost. It might lie unfound in a university archive. Certainly, some of the files at Emory are closed until 2022, but that is probably to protect the privacy of Carol Hughes, the Poet Laureate’s second wife.

The disappeared typescript was a draft of a novel, not a finished work. Would Sylvia herself wish us to read Double Exposure in its raw state?

She burned many manuscripts. But not this one. Or that missing journal. “Her blacks crackle and drag.”

While the train was still standing in the Gare de Lyon, Hadley went to buy a bottle of Evian water for the trip. She left the suitcase unattended on the train while she did so. When she came back, it was gone.

Hadley and Ernest Hemingway

At that point, nothing of Hemingway’s fiction had been published. In Paris, there was nothing left. With touching thoroughness, Hadley had packed both the originals and their carbons. Only two short stories survived the disaster. “Up in Michigan”, which he had buried in a drawer because Gertrude Stein had said it was unpublishable, while “My Old Man” was out with an editor at a magazine.

In a letter to Ezra Pound, in January 1923, Hemingway wrote: “I suppose you heard about the loss of my Juvenalia? I went up to Paris last week to see what was left and found that Hadley had made the job complete by including all carbons, duplicates, etc. All that remains of my complete works are three pencil drafts of a bum poem which was later scrapped, some correspondence between John McClure and me, and some journalistic carbons. You, naturally, would say, ‘Good’ etc. But don’t say it to me. I ain’t yet reached that mood.”

But maybe he did reach that mood. “The first and most important thing of all, for writers today,” Hemingway later said, “is to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone.” Juvenilia (or Juvenalia in Hemingway’s misspelling) are often just that – rambling, unstructured, wayward pieces of adolescent hopes and dreams. Which of us would gladly publish our teenage love poetry?

Hemingway had his language stripped clean all right. Indeed, with the loss of the manuscripts, and with time pressing to replace those vanished words in his bid to become a respected writer, Hemingway may have adopted and adapted the lean prose style for which he became famous.

(It is often said that he used the style guide of the Kansas City Star, where he had been a cub reporter, as his rule-book: “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English.”)

Hemingway never bothered to run a newspaper advertisement seeking the return of the manuscripts. When he considered one, he thought of offering a reward of 150 francs. About ten dollars. Grace under pressure? Or a sign that the manuscripts were not so valuable?

They would be valuable today, of course. If they survived. If they ever turned up.

What did the thief do, on realising that the stolen suitcase contained paper, worthless paper with the juvenile scribblings of an unknown writer? No gold, no diamonds, no lucrative passports to be traded on the black market. Throw them in the Seine? Burn them? Bury them in an attic?

Of course, if they do turn up in an attic, these lost manuscripts of a Nobel prize-winning author, they will be worth more than their weight in gold.

And then you leave the manuscript in the refreshment room at Reading Station.

The 2004 one-volume edition

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. The great work of Thomas Edward Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, seemed destined to have a difficult birth. The title, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, doesn’t really belong to the book. It was the title of an earlier work, in which Lawrence described his adventures in seven cities across Arabia. He burned this first step into the realms of authorship but, with an obvious fond memory, named the later work after it.

Lawrence wrote most of the first draft of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom in France during the spring of 1919, while at the Paris Peace Conference. After the railway-related loss of that first manuscript, while changing trains at Reading around Christmas of the same year, Lawrence rewrote the book from memory. He had to. Like so many reckless authors, he had destroyed (burned, probably) most of his working notes, some written on army message pads while in Arabia, while some notes were also in the stolen briefcase. The rewrite took Lawrence three months. Unusually for a lost-manuscript author, he preferred his original work. “It was shorter, snappier, and more truthful than the present version,” he wrote in a letter to Frederic Manning in 1930.

Lawrence sold the first three chapters of his second draft to Robert Graves, who published them in an American journal, The World’s Work between July and October 1921. Those three chapters are all that remain of the 400,000-word second draft. Lawrence wasn’t satisfied with it and, sticking with the proven successful method of dealing with poor quality prose by pyrotechnic means, burned it with a blow lamp in 1922. It was the third draft – although he still considered it “diffuse and unsatisfactory”, it escaped pyrotechnic attentions – that became the first edition of the book. The original manuscript of that draft is now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

However, Lawrence published the first edition mainly to circulate to friends and literary critics, not the public. Just eight copies were typeset and printed at the works of the Oxford Times newspaper; it was cheaper, in those days, than getting copies typewritten. This is the version of the famous book the world now calls the “Oxford text”. Lawrence corrected six copies of the proofs and had them bound. Of the original eight copies printed, only those six copies remain at large in the world. Lawrence’s own bound copy, in which he made further amendments in response to the comments of his readers, was sold at auction at Christie’s, New York, in May 2001. The buyer paid nearly one million dollars.

An article in the press asking for the return of the manuscript

What happened to the lost manuscript? Lawrence telephoned Reading Station from Oxford an hour after the discovery of the loss, but there was no sign of his briefcase. Despite articles, offers of a reward, and pleas in the press, no one came forward and nothing of the original manuscript was ever recovered. There are those who say that there was no thief at Reading, but that Lawrence, true to form when it came to manuscript destruction, burned the pages. Or lost the briefcase deliberately. It wouldn’t have been difficult. It was in a bank messenger’s bag – the kind, Lawrence said later, that usually holds gold. Tempting.

If that “more truthful” version of The Seven Pillars had ever been published, would it have become the enduring masterpiece we have today? Or did Lawrence, between 1919 and 1922, teach himself how to write? In 1919, he was a soldier. By 1922, after correspondence with EM Forster, Siegfried Sassoon and George Bernard Shaw, he wanted to be a writer. He wanted to produce a book that would be “an English fourth”on an exclusive bookshelf that contained Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, and Melville’s Moby-Dick.

In The Sunday Times in August, 1920, Lawrence wrote about the country he called Mesopotamia and we would later call Iraq:

“The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows.”

I’d say TE didn’t need too many lessons on writing. But if that Reading manuscript ever turns up, we’ll know.

At that particular point, just after the Thirty Years’ War, Denmark was a shadow of its former power, and in sway to the strength of its neighbour, Sweden. Reinking’s tract blamed the Swedes roundly for this appalling situation. Whatever the literary merits of Reinking’s work, or its accuracy, the Swedes took agin it. The tetchy Scandinavians cast Reinking into a dark prison, where he mouldered for many years. At last, he was offered a stark choice: to lose his head or eat his book. (An early variation on Izzard’s cake or death, obviously.) A politician through and through, Reinking preferred the culinary challenge. We don’t know whether his tract was weighty enough to provide an entire meal or merely an amuse-bouche, or whether he acted alone or with kitchen accomplices, but he boiled his manuscript up into a broth and ate it that way.

Ezekiel by Raphael

We can’t be certain what it tasted like, but previous reports from this little explored field sound promising. The Lord once gave Ezekiel a scroll of a book written within and without with lamentations, and mourning, and woe, and obliged him to eat it. Reports the prophet: “It was in my mouth as honey for sweetness.” (Ezekiel, 3:3)

Honey or wormwood, the manuscript-eating experience dissuaded Reinking completely from pursuing politics, penmanship or cookery as a career.

Rudbeck points out the location of Atlantis (northern Sweden)

Rudbeck’s main obsession, though, was Atlantis. He shared Plato’s belief that this lost civilisation was real. More than that, he advanced the theory that said fabled city was actually situated somewhere in the north of Sweden. He was assiduous in his search for archaeological evidence, so bustled tirelessly about his native land studying rune inscriptions, excavating natural landmarks, and collecting folklore and tales from the Norse sagas. In the course of these expeditions, he invented stratigraphy, a method for dating artefacts by soil strata, which is still in use today.

The resulting book, Atlantica, outlined in detail Rudbeck’s patriotic theory that Sweden was indeed the cradle of civilization, settled after the flood by the descendants of Noah. Many contemporaries considered the professor bats.

Atlantica was published in parallel columns of Swedish and Latin, and thus could be read by scholars deficient in the Scandinavian languages. (Every decent scholar had Latin in those days.) In four volumes, and running to over 2,000 pages in length, it was a work of undoubted scholarship as well as excited imagination.

Having set the world to rights, Rudbeck found time to work with his son (fortuitously named Rudbeck the Younger) on the hugely ambitious and poetically titled Campus Elysii — the Elsyian Fields — a botanica that aimed to survey and illustrate, in their natural colours, every plant so far discovered in the world. Sadly, thousands of woodcuts and many copies of Atlantica were lost in the fire that destroyed most of Uppsala on the 16th of May, 1702. While his house was burning down and his manuscripts were being reduced to ashes, Rudbeck stood on the roof of one of the university buildings and shouted fire-fighting instructions at the people of the city.

Rudbeck died shortly after the fire, some say from despair and disappointment caused by the loss of his great work.

Or possibly because documentary proof that Sweden was indeed the first and lost cradle of mankind perished in the conflagration.

For more information see: Isis, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Feb., 1939), pp. 114-119

Throughout 1834, Carlyle slaved over his history of the French Revolution with passion late into the night. When he had completed Volume One, he sent it to Mill to for his review.

On the evening of the 6th of March, 1835, Mill turned up at Carlyle’s house in Cheyne Walk, looking, Carlyle later wrote, “the very picture of desperation”.

Mill had left the manuscript at the house of his friend, Mrs Taylor. Her servant, who could not read, had used it to light the fire. All that was left of Carlyle’s passion and fury were a few charred leaves. Mill brought the leaves, as confirmation.

While most of us would greet this circumstance with hysteria and retribution, Carlyle was the epitome of politeness. Mill was beside himself with grief and self-recrimination. Carlyle probably offered him some tea. Mill offered to pay Carlyle for the damage, but Carlyle refused, saying that he could simply start again. Mill stayed very late, meaning that Carlyle, and his wife, Jane, had to stay up late, too, to comfort him.

Title page from the 1837 first edition

When Mill left, Carlyle’s first words to Jane were: “Mill, poor fellow, is terribly cut up. We must endeavour to hide from him how very serious this business is for us.” And it was serious. The Carlyles had no money, and Thomas knew he could never write that book again. He had destroyed his notes and could not remember what he had written: “I remember and can still remember less of it than of anything I ever wrote with such toil. It is gone.” He would have to tell Mill he couldn’t carry on.

That night, however, he had a dream. His father and brother rose from the grave and begged him not to abandon the work. The next morning, Carlyle told Mill that he would take the money after all. He used it to buy paper, and started writing again.

First, he wrote volumes two and three. Then, he recreated volume one. Carlyle wrote the entire manuscript from memory, words that came “direct and flamingly from the heart”.

The three-volume work — a heroic undertaking which charts the course of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1795 — was completed and published in 1837. It has never been out of print and is still in print nearly 200 years later.

Carlyle kept the charred leaves in his study for the rest of his life.