The printer was named Ezra Halsey. He was born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1819, and he died in Boston in 1887. He ran a small printing shop on Cornhill Street from 1846 until his death.

His correspondence, two thousand six hundred and forty letters in all, is held in the basement archive of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester. Approximately three hundred of the letters were sent. The rest were not.

Halsey was a copious draft-writer. He composed letters he never mailed. He filed them, in the same drawer as the sent ones, marked with a small x in the upper right corner.

The unsent letters are, to a modern reader, the more interesting half of the archive.

The sent letters are largely commercial. Halsey was negotiating prices for type, paper, ink. He was reminding customers about overdue bills. He was thanking suppliers for shipments.

The unsent letters are largely personal. Halsey was telling people what he thought of them. He was telling them what he wished he had said. He was writing to people who were dead.

I spent three days with the unsent letters in May. The archivist who helped me is named Beth Wolinsky. She has been cataloging the Halsey papers for six years.

She told me, when I arrived, that the unsent letters were her favorite collection in the building. She said this without elaboration. By the end of my second day, I understood why.

Halsey was, by all available evidence, a quiet man. The sent letters are clipped, efficient, almost cold. He does not use ten words where five will do.

The unsent letters are different. The unsent letters are spacious. The unsent letters use, sometimes, a hundred words where five would have done.

“The unsent letters use, sometimes, a hundred words where five would have done.”

An 1858 unsent letter to his brother, who had moved to California, runs to nine pages. It describes, in detail, the weather in Boston, the new type face Halsey had ordered from Philadelphia, and the way the light came through the front window of the shop at four in the afternoon in late September.

It does not mention that Halsey's wife had died two months earlier. It does not need to. The letter is written by a man whose wife has just died.

An 1864 unsent letter, to no named recipient, is two paragraphs long. It says: I set type today for an obituary of a young man from Roxbury. I did not know him. His mother brought the notice in person. She had walked from Roxbury because she did not trust the post. I set the type carefully. I do not know why I am writing this.

An 1871 unsent letter, to a man named Thomas Pelham, accuses Pelham of cheating Halsey in a paper-supply contract three years earlier. The letter runs to fourteen pages. It is meticulous. It cites specific prices on specific dates.

At the bottom of the fourteenth page, in a different ink, Halsey has written: I will not send this. He will not understand it. He will think I am unreasonable. I am not unreasonable. I am only correct.

Wolinsky pointed out, when I read this passage to her, that the phrase I am only correct appears in three separate unsent letters across two decades. It does not appear in any sent letter.

She said: "He had one phrase for himself that he never let anyone else hear."

The most striking unsent letter, to me, is dated November 12, 1879. It is addressed to Halsey's wife, who had been dead for twenty-one years.

The letter is one page. It begins: Lydia, the maple in the yard turned this week. It is the color you used to say was not really red, but a kind of brown with red inside it.

It continues for half a page, describing the tree, the sky, the wind, the smell of the air. It ends: I do not know if I am writing to you. I do not know if I am writing at all. The tree is very beautiful and there is no one in the house to tell.

Halsey filed this letter, like the others, with an x. He did not destroy it. He kept it for eight more years, until his death.

I asked Wolinsky what she made of the unsent letters as a collection.

She said she thought Halsey had used them as a private form of presence. He could not speak the things he wrote in them, but he could not bear to lose the things he wrote either. So he kept them. So he became, in his own basement, the only audience he had.

She said: "He was a printer. He understood that something only becomes real when it is set in type. The letters were his way of setting his life in type."

I asked whether the letters had been published.

She said no, and that there were no plans to publish them. She said the family had given the papers to the Society with the condition that they be kept together and made available to scholars.

She said about eight scholars had used the collection in twenty years. She said she hoped, eventually, there would be more.

I told her I thought there should be more. She nodded. She did not seem hopeful.