I pick up the first folder and open it. It contains a creased, dog-eared, and much folded letter, handwritten on paper that's a weird size. I peer at the faded scrawl, trying to make head or tail of it. "Jesus, boss, what the hell . . . ?" Luckily I have a scanner with an automatic document feeder. I carefully feed the brittle pages to the computer, one at a time, twitching the software to maximum resolution. On the first page I pick up a reasonable high-contrast scan—there's some ghosting, what looks like pale scribble showing through, as if the author tried to scrub something out—and zoom in. I puzzle out the date, first: October 11th, 1921. Then I turn the handwriting recognition software loose and sit back. After a while, it's cooked and ready to read.