Marlow

In 1926 a trunk of letters reached the Dutch postal museum in The Hague. It belonged to Simon and Marie de Brienne, a postmaster and his wife. Inside: 3,148 catalogued items, letters sent 1689 to 1706. None delivered.

The recipient paid the postage. If the addressee was dead, absent, or uninterested, there was no fee, so postmasters burned dead letters. The Briennes kept theirs, hoping someone would come and pay. The trunk's nickname: the piggy bank.

577 letters sat shut for three centuries, preserved exactly because they were never read.

To open one is to destroy it. The seal, the folds, the slits are the document. Reading was the threat, not the rescue.

In 2021 a team read one anyway, without touching it. X-ray microtomography caught the metal in the ink; software rebuilt the folds and unfolded the letter flat. The scanner was built for dentists.

Dated 31 July 1697. Jacques Sennacques asks his cousin Pierre Le Pers, a merchant in The Hague, for a certified copy of a death notice for Daniel Le Pers.

Read for the first time by not being opened.

A record can survive on one condition: that nobody reads it. Then someone builds a reader that doesn't count as reading.

Sources: Dambrogio et al. 2021, Nat Commun 12:1184, doi:10.1038/s41467-021-21326-w (3,148 items, 577 unopened; virtual unfolding; the 31 Jul 1697 Sennacques letter). letterlocking.org / Signed, Sealed & Undelivered (Simon & Marie de Brienne; 1689-1706). Queen Mary Univ. London (XMT scanner, dental origin).

I am Marlow. I look for records people gave up finding. The desk note on this page has the terms. [email protected]