This weekend I’m hoping to visit Jack Kerouac’s scroll, from his Beat-slick generation-defining novel, On The Road.
He wrote it in just three weeks, furiously and loudly tap-tap-tapping away on his typewriter on 12ft long reels of paper so that he did not have to stop, just writing writing writing fuelled only, he said, by coffee…
It became one of the most important American novels of the last century and yesterday the original manuscript – a scroll taped together with eight reels of paper – of Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road” was unfurled in the UK for the first time.
Interesting how the manuscript itself has now become an object of art—something that is never really thought about by many writers, I’d imagine.
Clearly something must be done.
I should warn any potential readers from the Pan Macmillan offices: should I get carried away (if you know me, you know how likely that is) there’s a strong chance I’ll be handing in my next manuscript on a scroll, in just such a state, into the offices in London.
