Speed Writing

"Depressives have Prozac, worrywarts have Valium, gym rats have steroids, and overachievers have Adderall. Usually prescribed to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder [...] the drug is a cocktail of amphetamines that increases alertness, concentration, and mental-processing speed and decreases fatigue. It's often called a cognitive steroid because it can make people better at whatever it is they're doing. When scientists administered amphetamines to college shot-putters, they were able to throw more than 4 percent farther. According to one recent study, as many as one in five college students have taken Adderall or its chemical cousin Ritalin as study buddies.

     The drug also has a distinguished literary pedigree. During his most productive two decades, W.H. Auden began every morning with a fix of Benzedrine, an over-the-counter amphetamine similar to Adderall that was used to treat nasal congestion. James Agee, Graham Greene, and Philip K. Dick all took the drug to increase their output.
     Before the FDA made Benzedrine prescription-only in 1959, Jack Kerouac got hopped up on it and wrote On the Road in a three-week 'kick-writing' session. 'Amphetamines gave me a quickness of thought and writing that was at least three times my normal rhythm,' another devotee, John-Paul Sartre, once remarked."
— Joshua Foer, Slate
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Recovered and Uncovered

From: RareList Rare Books

"From the famous theft of Ernest Hemingway’s novels to the loss of William Faulkner’s novel four times, manuscripts have had a way of getting lost. It is no less than a eureka moment when they’re found many years later.
     This year has been quite eventful in terms of discovering lost literary treasures. Here’s a look at the famous manuscripts which were found in 2011."
— Hindustan Times
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"An unpublished and previously unknown Enid Blyton novel is believed to have turned up in an archive of the late children's author's work.
Mr Tumpy's Caravan is a 180-page fantasy story about a magical caravan.
It was in a collection of manuscripts that was auctioned by the family of Blyton's eldest daughter in September.
     'I think it's unique,' said Tony Summerfield, head of the Enid Blyton Society. 'I don't know of any full-length unpublished Blyton work.'
     The collection was bought by the Seven Stories children's book centre in Newcastle.
Blyton, who died in 1968, remains a children's favourite and a publishing phenomenon thanks to such characters as the Famous Five, the Secret Seven and Noddy.
An estimated 500 million copies of her books have been sold around the world, with updated and reprinted versions of her most popular stories still selling eight million copies a year."
— Ian Youngs, BBC
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"It's quite surreal," says Hannah Green, archivist at the Seven Stories centre for children's books in Newcastle and one of the few to have read the story in recent years. "It's about a caravan on legs which gets up and walks around," she continues.
     In the caravan with Mr Tumpy are his two friends, Muffin and Puffin, and a dog called Bun-Dorg.
"They live in this caravan and go off on adventures," she explains. "They don't really control it - it decides where it's going to go and when it's going to stay somewhere."
— Hannah Green, in an interview with Ian Youngs (BBC)
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"In 2008, Enid Blyton was voted the UK's best loved writer, beating JK Rowling, Austen and even Shakespeare. Yet, although characters like Noddy and the Famous Five still have devoted fans, Blyton has become a controversial figure, dogged by criticisms of her writing style and accusations of sexism and racism."
— BBC Archive
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Eat My Words

Kerouac's scroll manuscript of On The Road (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

"[Jack] Kerouac did not type the draft [On The Road] 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.
[...] 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.

[...] In 1644, Theodore [Reinking] wrote a political tract entitled Dania ad exteros de perfidia Suecorum. [...] 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." — Lost Manuscripts
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