Cancer 16: A man before a square with a manuscript scroll before him.

From the BBC:

The scroll on which Jack Kerouac wrote his seminal Beat novel On the Road has been auctioned for a record $2.43m (£1.7m), nearly $1m more than the expected price.

The 36m (120-foot) scroll was bought by James Irsay, the owner of the Indianapolis Colts football team.

The final price - $2.2m (£1.5m) plus a buyer's premium of $226,000 (£158,666) - breaks the previous record paid for a literary work, $1.98m (£1.4m) for a 1920 copy of Franz Kafka's The Trial.

The manuscript of the cult classic was being sold at Christie's by the brother of Kerouac's third wife to pay inheritance taxes.

Mr Irsay is considering taking the manuscript on a road trip mirroring the one described in the novel.

"I look on it as a stewardship. I don't believe you own anything. In this world, it's dust to dust," he said.

The manuscript is pasted together in sections with the seams later reinforced with tape.

Road trip

In the run up to the auction, the manuscript had been on show at cities across the US, including San Francisco, considered to be the spiritual home of Mr Kerouac and the beat poets.

Mr Kerouac himself told Allen Ginsberg that the unravelled manuscript "looks like a road".

The sale comes 50 years after the book was completed, on 22 April 1951.