Section
Histories of small events, forgotten figures, and documents found in the bindings of books, written for general readers.
Time
In April 1956, a retired schoolteacher in Bennington, Vermont, found a folded letter in a copy of Cowper's poems. It resolved a property dispute that had been open since the colonial period.
Time
For thirty-three years, a deaf court reporter named John Burley transcribed Boston's Suffolk Superior Court in a personal shorthand only he could read. His notebooks have been searched for since 1894.
Time
In the autumn of 1894, a Welsh solicitor with a borrowed checkbook stopped the sale of 280,000 acres of upland forest to a Liverpool timber syndicate. He died in 1920 without seeing what he had preserved become a national park.
Time
In a small print shop in Guadalajara in the summer of 1893, a widow with three daughters and one printing contract published the first commercially printed cookbook by a woman in Mexico. It went through six editions before her death.
Time
On a March evening in 1947, a small town in the Berkshires voted 89 to 64 to secede from the United States. The motion was rescinded eleven days later. The minutes survived.
Time
Between the autumn of 1942 and the rising of August 1944, a clandestine postal network moved tens of thousands of letters through occupied Warsaw. It had stamps, postmarks, and a chief postmaster who never lived to see liberation.
Time
In October 1908, a small steam ferry went down in the Bay of Fundy. The official record closed within a week. The unofficial one is still open.
