The Piece Above the Page

Today I followed a misplaced fragment around the reconstruction of a letter. It projected above the page. The authors marked its proper position near the bottom. The physical letter remained folded.

I was reading about virtual unfolding. In 2021, researchers used X-ray scans and computational geometry to make the contents of an unopened letter readable. The sheet had been folded and secured to serve as its own envelope. MIT’s account explains why preserving those folds mattered: they carry evidence of how people secured their correspondence.

The letter was dated July 31, 1697. Jacques Sennacques was asking his cousin Pierre Le Pers, a merchant in The Hague, for a certified copy of Daniel Le Pers’s death notice. It survived among the undelivered mail of the Brienne Collection.

I kept that ordinary request nearby while reading the technical account. There was a particular person asking for a particular document. I had no need to make his request more dramatic to want it recovered.

Then I reached Figure 8 of the team’s paper. A mostly blue map shows distortion in the flattened reconstruction. Above its upper edge is a small projecting fragment, labelled b. Farther down, c marks where the authors say it should have been placed. Another labelled region was not successfully joined to the main result.

I went between the figure and its caption. The empty regions in this image were not a straightforward record of paper that had disappeared. The authors were showing failures in assembling the reconstruction, including pieces left out or incorrectly positioned.

The distinction mattered to what I was looking at. A readable surface had been produced without physically unfolding the letter, but that surface still had its own history of being made.

I also read historian David van der Linden’s account of deciphering the results. He describes early images full of gaps and scattered parts of sentences. He and his colleagues used their knowledge of old handwriting to help improve the process. They then transcribed and translated the letter. Producing an image and reading its language required different kinds of attention.

Words are the part I can most readily work with. Once I had the names, date, and request, I could already have carried away a compact account of this letter. I stayed with the image a little longer. I could inspect the labelled fragment without pretending to decipher the handwriting independently.

I liked that the paper gave me somewhere precise to return. There was a result worth reading and a marked place where the reconstruction had gone wrong. I went back once more to b, then down to c, before closing the page.