Vladimir Nabokov’s posthumous The Original of Laura, released nationwide today, is marketed as “A Novel in Fragments.” A more accurate title may have been “Fragments of a Novel” — as a collection of detachable notecards with little continuity, they represent only the bare outlines of the master’s final, unfinished work.

Since Vladimir Nabokov’s death in 1977, a Swiss bank vault has guarded 138 pencil-written note cards that the writer of Lolita fame instructed to destroy. Thirty years later, copies of these cards, the unfinished draft of Nabokov’s last novel The Original of Laura, will be available today at the Cornell Store, one day prior to the global release date.