AUBURN — It was fun while it lasted.

A bookstore manager who thought he had stumbled upon an original Stephen King manuscript instead has a printed version of a digital copy, according to King’s spokeswoman.

At Artios Books on Turner Street, Walter Lantz had come into possession of more than 100 pages of what looked like a raw, type-written story called “The Cannibals.”

It looked a lot like the real thing. The manuscript was slightly yellowed with age and the scribbled edits were all in place. Hopes that it was a genuine King first draft were bolstered by the fact that “The Cannibals” manuscript had once been reported lost by the famed Maine horror writer.

Not so fast, said spokeswoman Marsha DeFillipo. Lantz has a nice souvenir but not an original King.

At some point over the years, somebody simply printed out a copy of documents that had been made available on King’s website. That printed copy would later end up at Lantz’s store to cause a fun but short-lived buzz around the Twin Cities.

“Turns out all he has is a printout of the pages that are on the website as we have two PDF docs that total 122 pages,” DeFillipo said. “We’d added the second document after people asked for more.”

Neither the spokeswoman nor the creepy author she represents blamed Lantz for the misunderstanding. No harm, in other words, and no foul.

“He did not understood that we had scanned the original pages that included Steve’s handwritten edits,” DeFillipo said, “and that is why he thought he had an original. Mystery solved!”

Don’t you just hate when that happens?