A 13,000-word romantic novella written by Margaret Mitchell when she was a teenager has been sold to Scribner, the publisher of her only novel, "Gone With The Wind."
The book, titled "Lost Laysen," is a tale of honor and unrequited love set in the South Pacific.It was written in 1916 in pencil in a pair of blue-cover composition books that like a message in a bottle went unread for more than half a century until being found in a cache of papers left by a lifelong friend of the author.
"Lost Laysen," together with about 50 black-and-white photographs of Mitchell and her girlhood friends and 15 letters she wrote to her lifelong friend, Henry Love Angel, will be published next May by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, which is owned by Viacom Inc.
"We will publish `Lost Laysen' in time for the 60th anniversary of the publication of `Gone With the Wind' and just before the Olympics in Atlanta," said Susan Moldow, publisher of Scribner. Atlanta was Mitchell's hometown.
Scribner is the successor to Macmillan, which gave Miss Mitchell a $500 advance in 1935 for "Gone With The Wind."
That epic Civil War romance still sells about 250,000 copies a year around the world and is available in two hard-cover editions, one a facsimile of the original 1936 book and one with modern type.
"I really was charmed and enchanted that the story, which showed much of the promise that `Gone With The Wind' fulfilled," Moldow said.
She added that she was confident of strong sales because, "while sophistication about sexual matters may have changed a lot since 1916, the lure and appeal of the unfulfillable romance remains strong."
The book will also include an essay by Debra Freer, curator of the Road to Tara Museum in Atlanta, where a page of the manuscript is on display, Moldow said.
She said she did not know if the manuscript would run untouched or be edited to clean up misspelled words, grammatical errors or other problems.
"It's pretty clean, so I don't know if much editing would be needed, but we haven't worked out how the estate feels about tampering with her work," Moldow said.
The novella was discovered last year by Henry Angel Jr., 70, the son of Henry Love Angel, according to Irv Schwartz, a partner in Renaissance, the Los Angeles literary agency that arranged the sale.
The senior Angel died in 1945, four years before Mitchell.
An auction for the novella was to be held in Manhattan, but Schwartz and his partner, Alan Nevins, called it off after Scribner produced a copy of the original contract for "Gone With The Wind," which included an option for the author's next book.
Schwartz emphasized that even with the option, Scribner had made "a very substantial preemptive bid."
Neither he nor Muldow would say how much was paid, but one publishing executive said the minimum auction bid was to have been $1 million.
Dramatic rights will be auctioned by the William Morris Agency, which represents the Mitchell estate, said Owen Laster, the agency's executive vice president. The auction will take place after the novella is published, he added.