Stamps Books

“But here in Norvelt we had one of those librarians who collected the tiniest books of human history. Mrs. Hamsby, who died yesterday at age seventy-seven, was the first postmistress of Norvelt and she saved all the lost letters, those scraps of history that ended up as undeliverable in a quiet corner of Norvelt. But they were not unwanted. Mrs. Hamsby carefully pinned each envelope to the wall, so that the rooms of her house were lined from floor to ceiling with letter upon letter, and when you arrived for tea it appeared as if the walls were papered with the overlapping scales of an ancient fish. You were always welcome to unpin any envelope and read the orphaned letter, as if you were browsing in a library full of abandoned histories.
Each room has its own mosif of stamps, so that the parlor room is papered with huamn stamps as if people such as Lincoln, or Queen Elizabeth, or Joan of Arc had come to visit. The bedroom has the stamps of lovely landscapes you might discover in your dreams, and the bathroom has stamps with oceans and rivers and rain. Each stamp is a snapshot of a story, of one thin slice of history captured like an ant in amber. there is history in every blink of an eye, and Mrs. Hamsby knew well that within the lost letter was the folded soul of the writer wrapped in the body of the envelope and mailed into the unknown. And for this tiny museum of lost hisotry we citizens of Norvelt thank her.”
― Jack Gantos, Dead End in Norvelt