In September Viking is releasing an edition of the original “scroll” manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, along with a 50th anniversary edition of the novel itself. The manuscript’s original features—it consists of hundreds of typed pages taped together to form a roll of about 36 ½ m—are well known since it made the headlines in 2001 when it was bought at Christie's in New York for £1.7m by James Irsay, the owner of an Indianapolis football club, who subsequently took it on a road tour. (It is not unique, though, as D.A.F. de Sade's manuscript of 120 journées de Sodome, which he hid in a niche while he was locked up in the Bastille, similarly consists of sheets and scraps of paper taped together.) The fact that it is a scroll represents for some the nonstop flow of Kerouac's writing, as he banged out the book on his typewriter in a mere three weeks in 1951, though one can clearly see the numerous corrections and alterations. According to John Sampas, Kerouac's brother-in-law and literary executor, Kerouac made revisions to the original text during the 6-year period when he was trying to place the book with a publisher.
The manuscript is now kept at the University of Indiana. It is currently on exhibition at the Boott Cotton Mills Museum, Lowell National Historical Park in Massachusetts, from June 15 through October 14, 2007. A video of the curator unrolling the manuscript can be seen here
HarperCollins' are said to be bringing out through their Voyager imprint a 70th anniversary edition of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, together with a two-volume The History of the Hobbit, which will contain the previously unpublished manuscript version of the novel. No further information as yet on the Voyager Books website.
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