Recognizing that they might possess invisible treasures, the Dead Letter Office advertised items and held periodic auctions. All the packages were sealed, however, so that participants had to wager blind. An 1875 auction boasted a sixty-page catalog of items that had accumulated since 1869. Here the private system of the mail spills its guts. No longer understood as a system of moving items that might be used by any number of recipients in addition to the intended, the postal service's new confidentiality of address allows the trappings of private meaning to pile up.
Dead letters reveal the indecipherability of private history.
The items accumulated at the Dead Letter Office are hieroglyphics, a lost language both sacred and ghastly, that surely would speak to someone somewhere but is a sealed book to us. They are bodies without spirits to breathe life into them. The contents of the Dead Letter Office are melancholy props of an enormous dereliction, that of the unclaimed dead, the unredeemed. For by the cart-load they are annually burned. On errands of life, these letters speed to death.