After the suicide of AbEx painter Mark Rothko in 1970, his estate fell, as has been famously documented, into “a decade of Dickensian legal battles,” and thus although it had been rumored that he’d written a manuscript, it wasn’t discovered until 1988 “in a warehouse, in an acordian folder marked simply ‘Miscellaneous Papers.'” What was found, Phoebe Hoban reports in a New York Times story, was “sloppily typed, with numerous hand-marked additions and deletions — and more numerous typos — and it betrayed no obvious order or narrative direction,” according to Rothko’s son, Christopher Rothko. But it was also an utterly remarkable book, he says, explaining why he has allowed the Yale University Press to publish the manuscript, which he calls “uncanny and almost unnerving,” and an “abstractionist’s manifesto.”