Objects with stories.
The long ones. A single object, followed from the first photograph through everything it turned out to be attached to — including the parts still unresolved.
A worn H.J. Wehman song sheet does not preserve Napoleon's words. It preserves something stranger: the invented Napoleon ordinary people could buy, sing, collect and eventually ask an app to identify.
An 1862 book scores several hundred New York merchants on what they died worth. It took a while to notice that the author is in there too, under a false name, in the third person, with his column left empty.
Longfellow opens Hiawatha by asking who told him the story, and answers with a singer he invented. The real answer is an Ojibwe woman who published in a handwritten magazine under a name she made up, and who was dead thirteen years before the poem made her material famous.
A small green guide promised trees and shrubs. It opened into maps, vanished reservoirs, surviving elms, a suspicious yellowwood and the unsettling fact that Central Park has never stood still.
Five dollars for an East Syriac book in a Madison Heights garage, out of a library stamped Sacred Heart Seminary, with a chapter of the Mishnah folded inside it. The book turned out to be the smaller find.
An 1882 wedding greeting inside a wreath a grandmother built by hand, a boy's 1873 confirmation certificate in an oval frame, twenty-five dollars for the pair. I went looking for a bride and groom and found somebody else entirely.
A harmless-looking 1854 fishing book opens into a Victorian doctor-priest, edible mushrooms, Roman fish sauce, luxury ponds, bad medicine and the question of what curiosity is for.
Twenty-one young men, a lettered sweater, an old frame. We’re still working through what can actually be established.