The Hunt for Lost Stevenson Treasure

X, doesn't mark the spot when it comes to Robert Louis Stevenson's manuscripts. They've been cast off to the four corners of the world. People are on the look out for them, however.

From the piece in the Scotsman...

However, when Stevenson died in 1894, his archive, or what remained of it, was passed on to his wife, Fanny Osbourne. Upon her death, Isobel, her daughter and Stevenson's stepdaughter, sold it at two auctions at New York's Anderson Galleries in 1914 and 1915. The two catalogues for the sales list included 200 original manuscripts and hundreds of books from his personal and extensive library.

The manuscripts ranged from his earliest childhood, such as three pages of bible verses, written at the age of six in what the catalogue described as "crude printed letters" to later essays.

Other manuscripts were sold at later sales. As Dury explained, these include the essays "Virginibus Puerisque" and "On Falling in Love", sold in a British Red Cross fund-raising sale in 1918 but unheard of since. They also included a companion essay to "How Books Have to be Written", "On the Value of Books and Reading", sold in 1914; and Stevenson's journal written as a law clerk in Edinburgh, which was sold in 1924.

Dury said: "These works are probably still in private collections, but they may also be in some library with the fact not so far uncovered by scholars. It is unlikely that we will ever find manuscripts to major works that have never been reported in sales catalogues."

For literary scholars an author's manuscript is as close as they can reach to reading their mind. "It takes us as close as we can get to the moment of creation," said Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday's literary editor and the author of The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read. Kelly, who is giving an address at the beginning of the conference, said: "The original manuscript shows us the process of writing, what was scored out and changed and even who else changed it. If these missing manuscripts were found then they would sell handsomely."