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Stephen King’s personally owned Mead Composition notebook that he used between the years 1985 and 1986, containing over 80 handwritten pages by the legendary horror novelist, which includes an early draft for the short story ‘The End of the Whole Mess’ and over 50 pages dedicated to sections of King’s 1987 dark fantasy novel The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three, the second book of King’s acclaimed Dark Tower series. Included with the notebook is a signed typed certificate of authenticity from King, one page, 8.5 x 11, personal illustrated letterhead, August 26, 1986, which reads: “This is to verify the authenticity of the enclosed notebook, which is to be auctioned for the benefit of the family of Manly Wade Wellman. The notebook contains material handwritten by me during 1985 and 1986.”
The notebook, 7.5 x 9.75, which bears an affixed Garbage Pail Kids card sticker (‘Alice Island’) to the front cover, opens with a short story draft entitled “How the Whole Mess Ended, By Stephen King,” who pens the story in black ink across the next 15 pages. The story begins: “I want to tell you about the end of war, the degeneration of mankind, and the death of the Messiah — this is an epic story, deserving thousands of pages and a shelf of volumes, but you — if there are any 'you' later on, to read this — will have to settle for the Reader’s Digest Condensed version. The direct injection works very fast — forty-five minutes to two hours, depending on blood-type, and I'll be damned if I know what my blood type is, although I’m twenty-seven years old. If it’s O, I think you are in for a lot of blank pages, my hypothetical friend. I think I better assume the worst and go as fast as I can.”
The sections related to The Drawing of the Three are penned in a mixture of black, blue, and red ballpoint and ink, and correlate with chapters related to the sections ‘The Lady of Shadows,’ ‘Reshuffle,’ and ‘The Pusher.” It begins on a page marked “A,” with “Chapter 1: Detta and Odetta,” which reads, in part: “Stripped of jargon, what Adler said was this: the ideal schizophrenic — if such a word can be used to describe a person in an abnormal state — would be a man or woman not only unaware of his other persona(e), but one unaware that anything at all was amiss in his or her life. Adler should have met Detta Walker and Odetta Holmes.”
Another passage, marked “11,” reads: “The gunslinger opened his eyes slowly and looked at Eddie, who stood panting before him with sweat running down the sides of his face and plastering his shirt against his chest in a single dark blotch. Any former semblance of neatness had disappeared. The bluish-purple crescents under his eyes completed the picture. Eddie Dean was a mess. ‘You gave me the gun,’ Richard said. Eddie thought the gunslinger looked as bad as he had before the first short dose of Feflex.”
A page marked “BB” starts with “The Pusher / Chapter One: Sweet Medicine,” which reads, in part: “When he had entered Detta, Roland had come forward immediately — which was to say, he had announced himself. Before he even began to speak to the mind he had entered, she sensed him and began to fight. In the bathroom of the sky-carriage, Roland had not come forward; he had remained far back in Eddie’s mind, only watching and yet some deep part of Eddie — not his mind, the gunslinger thought, but his ka — had sensed the entry and had sensed out a vague warning.” In fine condition. Accompanied by its original clamshell case, and a handwritten ‘thank you’ letter from Frances Wellman, the widow of beloved science fiction and fantasy writer Manly Wade Wellman, who had passed at the age of 82 on April 5, 1986; in the short letter, Wellman sends thanks to the auction winner “for buying the Stephen King notebook.”
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