Despite the wizardry of the IT revolution, the writer's first draft remains a treasure. No amount of technology can allay writers' anxiety about their original versions. The stark horror of the crashing computer, indeed, can make one strangely nostalgic for the age of fountain pen and quires.

In the days of the typewriter and, before that, the humble pen, novelists would go to extravagant lengths to protect their work from fire, theft and acts of god. One paranoid soul of my acquaintance used to store her manuscripts, wrapped in tin-foil, in the fridge, the one place known to be immune to the fiercest domestic inferno.

We may smile at such measures, but English literature teaches us to be careful. When Thomas Carlyle sent The History of the French Revolution to his friend John Stuart Mill to read, Mill's housemaid, mistaking it for waste paper, used it to light a fire. Carlyle had not kept a copy but managed to rewrite it in six months.

Carlyle's case is not remarkable. Both Ernest Hemingway and Malcolm Lowry suffered 'lost' manuscripts. John Steinbeck's dog ate Of Mice and Men in an early draft.

But then there's the consolation that some 'lost' manuscripts go on to enjoy surprisingly vigorous afterlives. Consider, for instance, the case of TE Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom. After the Great War was over, Lawrence settled down to describe (some would say 'mythicise') his exploits. His first draft was completed by the autumn of 1919. Then, changing trains at Reading, his briefcase containing the manuscript was stolen.

Early in 1920, while the book was still green in his memory, Lawrence wrote out a second version. The result: 400,000 words, complete but, in his own words, 'hopelessly bad'. Undaunted, during the next two years, Lawrence revised and polished his text and in 1922, wishing to expose his magnum opus to friends and critics, had it typeset at the printing works of the Oxford Times.

In those days of hot metal, he could not afford corrections and this 'Oxford' text contained countless errors. None the less, Lawrence had six sets of proofs bound up, and those who were privileged to read them were astonished. In a letter to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, George Bernard Shaw wrote: 'The book is a masterpiece.' Other passionate admirers included EM Forster and Robert Graves.

Lawrence, who was always fragile, became stressed by the effort of completing Seven Pillars of Wisdom and suffered a breakdown. He later wrote: 'I nearly went off my head... heaving at that beastly book of mine.'

Friends and admirers, concerned that his work would be lost, persuaded him to abridge it for a lavish subscription edition. Lawrence cut the 'Oxford' text by a quarter. Superbly illustrated, it nearly bankrupted its author and sold fewer than 200 copies. To recover his losses, Lawrence was forced to authorise yet another abridgement for the general public. This appeared as The Revolt in the Desert, and launched the process by which its author passed into legend, and, ultimately, into the character portrayed by Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia.

In the summer of 1935, within weeks of Lawrence's premature death in a motorcycle accident on Clouds Hill, in Dorset, the abbreviated 'Subscribers' Edition' was published for a general audience with promises that the Oxford Text would appear shortly. Unfortunately, the astonishing success of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, one of the cult bestsellers of the 1930s, became an insuperable obstacle to the longer, and superior, version.

In 1997, 75 years after it was completed, Seven Pillars of Wisdom came out of copyright, and a Complete edition, a corrected version of the 'Oxford' text, was finally published.

You might think that its life as a bestseller had by now exhausted the market. Not at all. The Castlehill Press, a small independent imprint, has just published yet another definitive edition of Lawrence's 'Oxford' text.

Although it is arguable that the appetite for such an unabridged text could be satisfied by an online version, or that there are enough secondhand copies knocking about, Castlehill (01725-512564) has produced Seven Pillars of Wisdom as an attractive hardback, priced at £35. Not bad for a book purloined on Reading station.

Once again, the printed volume, like the writer's constant anxieties, has proved surprisingly enduring.

Is the pen still mightier than the PC?