Whether the world at large recognized him or his work, something had changed inside the shifting identity of the fugitive Edgar Allan Poe – something irrevocable. He was an author now.

Leatherbound books are an expensive form of wallpaper, and yet every English nobleman’s home seems to have had them. Their endless sets of the works of Cooper and Scott and Goethe, in finely tanned bindings with marbled endpapers, all end up with this sort of dealer sooner or later. I look through a set of Cooper and, without surprise, find uncut pages: these books were never actually read.

Back then, Manhattan was the infant country.

New York was the swing state in the upcoming presidential election – and Manhattan was the swing district in New York State. Control the city, and you controlled the 1800 presidential race.

If you grew up in a rural area, you have seen how farmhouses come and go, but the dent left by cellars is permanent. There is something unbreakable in that hand-dug foundational gouge into the earth. Books are the cellars of civilization: when cultures crumble away, their books remain out of sheer stupid solidity.

So far as any literary genre can be said to have been invented by one author, Edgar Allan Poe is that author, and the detective story is that genre.

It is a telling commentary on how authors control what they write, but not what is read. Poe regarded his tales of ratiocination as something of a distraction; his great loves were poetry and his “prose poem,” Eureka. “The Raven” was indeed Poe’s most famous work during his lifetime, and time has not lessened its charms – but as art it is distinctly backward-looking.

But this much is known: Hamilton shot into the trees. Burr, leveling his pistol at his foe, did not.

What you mean to find matters less than what you do find.

I been brought up a hatter,” he sighed, “people would have come into the world without heads.