Jim Canary, conservator of the On the Road scroll gives an interview on preserving this masterpiece, reading The Beats and being friends with Jim Irsay.

 

The IMA will reunite two of the iconic members of the American anti-establishment "Beat Generation" of the 1950s, novelist Jack Kerouac and photographer Robert Frank. The centerpiece of the exhibition is the 120-foot-long original typescript for Kerouac's 1957 cross-country odyssey, On the Road, owned by Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay. The manuscript, 84 feet of which will be on display, will be accompanied by 83 photographs taken by Robert Frank during his own two-year cross-country pilgrimage and published first in Europe in 1958 as Les Americains. The IMA will borrow the almost singular complete set of Frank's photographs owned by the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts.