Just a few weeks ago, on March 12, 2026, which would have been Jack Kerouac’s 104th birthday, the *On the Road* scroll sold at auction at *Christie’s* in New York for a whopping $12,135,000. This marks a new and historic record: the artifact is now the most expensive literary manuscript to sell at auction regardless of period or origin. Twenty-five years ago, this same scroll had already sold for what was then a record price: in 2001, Jim Irsay, erstwhile owner of the Indianapolis Colts, had purchased it for $2.43 million, then the highest paid price for a literary manuscript from the 20th century. In 2020, the Mills College copy of a Shakespeare first folio (or, F1) sold for $10 million, the previous record holder. If we take inflation into account, when the Huntington Library in Pasadena purchased most of the Duke of Devonshire’s book collection for $750,000 in 1908—including the first quarto of *Hamlet*, still only one of two surviving copies—the adjusted price tag might fall upwards of $30 million.…