The buyer paid nearly one million dollars.Īn article in the press asking for the return of the manuscript

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. Of the original eight copies printed, only those six copies remain at large in the world. Lawrence corrected six copies of the proofs and had them bound. This is the version of the book the world now calls the “Oxford text”. 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. However, Lawrence published the first edition mainly to circulate to friends and literary critics, not the public. The original manuscript of that draft is now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. 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. 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.

Those three chapters are all that remain of the 400,000-word second draft. 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. “It was shorter, snappier, and more truthful than the present version,” he wrote in a letter to Frederic Manning in 1930. Unusually for a lost-manuscript author, he preferred his original work. Some notes were also in the stolen briefcase. Like so many reckless authors, he had destroyed (burned, probably) most of his working notes, some written on army message pads while in Arabia. After the railway-related loss of that first manuscript, Lawrence rewrote the book from memory. 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. He burned this first step into the realms of authorship but, with an obvious fond memory, named the later work after it. It was the title of an earlier work, in which Lawrence described his adventures in seven cities across Arabia. The title, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, doesn’t really belong to the book. The great work of Thomas Edward Lawrence - Lawrence of Arabia - looks like it was always destined to have a difficult birth.

Book the seven pillars of wisdom