Lost Manuscripts

 Today I noticed in looking into a volume by John Lukacs the passage

In one instance, the book was delayed when the secretary who was supposed to retype the manuscript (the ephemeral paramour of the chief editor) forgot it in the broom closet of her summer rental apartment on Fire Island.

The book was The Last European War, 1939-1941, the passage appeared first in Confessions of an Original Sinner.

 This recalled what Wright Morris says in A Cloud of Light of his second novel, The Man Who Was:

... one of my first readers, a teacher at the Baldwin School, a Swiss woman with a profound dislike for speed reading, called me to ask if there was not something peculiar with a line of text on page 219. This line read "To get her mind off Boulder Dam I took the road up Baldy wanted to know about Boulder Dam." I allowed as how the line did sound a bit strange. A word or a phrase had been dropped. I would hasten to check on it. On checking this out--which took some time since I lacked the original copy of the manuscript--I found that eight or ten pages were missing.... Some months later, conducting my own inscrutable investigation, I discovered that the editor in charge of the galleys had been suffering a mid-career crisis, complicated romantically, that had finally revealed itself in pages missing from assorted galleys. They had simply vanished. The prime exhibit, designed to calm small losers like myself, was a mystery novel, written by Marjorie Bonner, the wife of Malcolm Lowry, which  was published without its concluding chapter. No question that this book was a mystery that remained unsolved. Only a handful of readers, besides the author, took the pains to point this out.

Here I don't see how lost galleys should have created the gaps. One sent galley proofs out for proofreading and perhaps reviews: the galleys themselves, long, heavy trays of type, by then usually Linotype slugs, never left the printer's. I would have expected bits missing from galley proofs to appear as clusters unusually dense in missed errors. I suspect that it was pages of manuscript that went missing rather than galleys.

In my copy-editing days, I once stepped off a train at Metro Center, leaving an envelope of manuscripts behind. Realizing this just too late to step back on the train, I took the next train out to Stadium-Armory, where the Orange and Blue lines diverged. There I waited for I suppose the second Blue Line train heading west, stepped on, and retrieved the envelope. I can't say that romance made me leave the envelope--I was just absent-minded.