Discolored creases show that a letter has been folded and carried in a pocket book, perhaps for years. The idiosyncrasies of paper making and handwriting give every document a faint perfume of individuality. Holmes destroyed nearly all the letters he received from Lady Castletown during the time of their romantic liaison, but he kept one. It was written on a small sheet of heavy stock, hardly more than a card, folded over once. With the help of Dr. Peter E Stevens, curator of the Harvard Herbaria, I was able to identify the leaves, and so fill in a detail, a slender narrative thread in Holmes's life .
Documents are so rich in meaning that a laundry list is a treasure.
I felt the same excitement when I found a box of Holmes's old check stubs, and his father's appointment book for the last year of his life, in which by careful attention one could see that, toward the end, Holmes was making the entries his father was no longer able to write. Faint pencilled x's and crosses in his diary, imitated from his father's, mark episodes of ill health. I sometimes think one could extract a whole biography from a single document as, in Holmes's simile, archaeologists reconstruct an extinct fish from a single scale. With enough patience and ingenuity I think Holmes's check stubs would yield up the story of his friendships in New York City, an otherwise still unopened chapter in his life story. But the documents are there, waiting for new hands to unfurl their inner petals.