Since Lawrence disposed of the manuscript of Sea and Sardinia (in the lavatory, according to Frieda), the earliest available text is a typescript of it made, with two carbon copies, by an American woman working in the American Consulate in Palermo, who farmed out part of the work to someone else. Altogether three typewriters appear to have been used. Lawrence made cursory handwritten corrections to all three copies, not all identical, and sent the top and first carbon copies to his American agent and the second carbon to his temporary English agent, who passed it on to Curtis Brown. All three copies have survived. The top copy was submitted to Lawrence's American publisher, Thomas Seltzer, whose carbon went to the editor of Dial in which extracts from the book were printed. It is not clear what happened to Curtis Brown's carbon.

For the American edition (1921) Seltzer's editor made a number of cuts in the text to remove either politically contentious remarks or passages dealing with bodily functions and imposed on the text American spellings and Seltzer's house style. Typographical inconsistencies in the typescript were not always corrected, and new typos were introduced. The English edition (1923) was set from a copy of the American edition (apparently Secker never saw the carbon copy of the typescript sent to Curtis Brown), thus perpetuating its cuts and most of its errors - besides committing new ones - and replacing Seltzer's house style with its own, which involved re-anglicising American ...