The Scroll, Bar and Bookstore

I saw the original manuscript of On the Road in 2006. It was at SFMOMA in San Francisco, behind glass, unrolled just enough to see the typing. One continuous scroll of paper, 120 feet long, fed through a typewriter in 1951. No paragraphs or chapters. Just the sentences one after another after another.

I stood there for a long time. Other people moved past it quickly. But I didn’t. Kerouac wrote the real names and told his truth in that book. Only to turn fiction come publication. But it reads as truth to me today as it did as a teenager first finding Jack’s masterpiece.

Afterwards I walked to Vesuvio. If you don’t know it, it’s the bar next door to City Lights bookstore on Columbus Avenue. Kerouac drank there. So did Neal Cassady and the rest of the beatnik gang over the years. By the time I arrived it was full of hip jazz types in trilby hats drinking red wine or gin or whiskey or beer or all the above at four in the afternoon. The kind of people who look like they’ve read every book and mused over thousands of words: for years. I sat at the bar and ordered whatever the loose change in my pocket could afford. The place had that feeling some bars have where the walls remember more than the people in them. Once fuelled on cheap beer, I walked next door to City Lights.

City Lights is not just a bookstore. It’s a room where American literature changed shape. Lawrence Ferlinghetti opened it in 1953 and published Allen Ginsberg’s Howl when nobody else would. He was arrested for it. He won the case. The poem and collection stayed in print. I walked in and Ferlinghetti was right there. Right in front of me with his soft eyes and tall frame and Santa beard and waistcoat and striped black trousers. He was old by then, in his late eighties, but he was there, in the shop, among the shelves and with words. I didn’t say anything to him; he felt like a monument or piece of art or installation to me. Besides, I didn’t need to say anything and wouldn’t know where to start. The bookstore was our conversation; his time served as a prominent and gifted beat-poet.

I bought a copy of On the Road from City Lights that afternoon because it felt like the right thing to do, even though I owned a copy. Twenty years later, the scroll I stood in front of just sold for $12.1 million.

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$12 million for a scroll

On March 12, 2026, which would have been Kerouac’s 104th birthday, Christie’s in New York auctioned the On the Road scroll. It sold to Zach Bryan, the country musician, for $12,135,000. That makes it the most expensive literary manuscript ever sold at auction. Any period. Any language.

The scroll had already sold once before. In 2001, Jim Irsay, the owner of the Indianapolis Colts, bought it for $2.43 million. That was a record at the time. The new price is five times that.

Bryan seems serious about the legacy. Last year he bought the church in Lowell, Massachusetts where Kerouac was baptised and where his funeral was held. Plans are underway to turn it into a Kerouac museum and cultural centre.

None of this would surprise Kerouac’s readers. The book has never gone away. Bob Dylan said reading On the Road changed his life the way it changed everyone else’s. Knausgård cites it. Bolaño translated Kerouac’s poetry into Spanish. Murakami put a Kerouac-obsessed character at the centre of Sputnik Sweetheart. Obama listed it in his top five most influential books. Patti Smith, Tom Waits, Lana Del Rey, David Bowie. The list goes on because the road goes on and that’s how Jack would want his work remembered. Boundless and roaming, much like his early youthful adventures.

The academics never liked Kerouac much. The critics were even worse for him. But the readers kept reading and the musicians kept listening and twenty years after I stood in front of that scroll in San Francisco, someone paid twelve million dollars for it. And the story is about the forgotten and lost, largely.

I think about that afternoon sometimes. Vesuvio, City Lights, the scroll behind glass. Ferlinghetti standing among the shelves like he’d always been there. The jazz hats. The cheap wine. A copy of On the Road in my bag on the flight home.

Some things you see once and carry forever. That scroll was one of them.