Strange things are afoot in our house this holiday season. A week or so ago, our one-year-old natural-gas-burning furnace went on the fritz. Suddenly, the computerized state-of-the-art gizmo we installed before last winter couldn’t get the house above 57 degrees. This, of course, is just before we’re hosting a small crowd of people for the holidays. It reminded me of the time a storm window mysteriously shattered next to the bed in middle of the night. Or the way our lights keep randomly not working, and then flickering back to life, and then not working again. (I don’t believe in things being haunted, or the supernatural. I repeat that sentence 10 times before I fall asleep every night.)

Anyway, on Sunday, the temperature plummeted down to around 50. The furnace is on life support, and until we get someone in there to fix it, we’re stuck.

The truly bizarre thing is, I’m the only one who seems to mind. Vaughn is only 7 years old, so his protective head-to-toe weatherproof coating is still under warranty. And Ann is a character who wandered in straight out of the 18^th century Irish frontier. She would have been fine in the days when they heated a house for a day with single clod of sheep dung. If you dropped her blindfolded into the middle of the wilderness, she could easily sustain herself for weeks on wood-boring insects and leaf litter.

So I’m the only one who seems to mind. To entertain myself between shivering fits, I’ve come up with this top 10 list. With apologies to David Letterman, here goes.

Top Ten Reasons I Know the House is Really Chilly

10. Kim Jong-un called, is interested in leasing the upstairs as a new North Korean gulag

9. Mysterious lumps in the bed turned out to be frost heaves. (I have no idea what those actually are. I just love the term frost heaves.)

8. Ann said she actually needed something to warm up, so she had her yak milk with no ice

7. The Green Bay Packers called, want to practice on the dining room carpet as a way to simulate the frozen tundra

6. Frost cracks appeared on the artificial Christmas tree

5. Seven Generations Charter School officials called about renting classroom space in the basement, citing the fact that no mold can survive in sub-arctic conditions. (Sorry, parochial humor.)

4. Icicles falling from the mantle tore down the Christmas stockings

3. Mice that had snuck into the house when autumn arrived were seen trying to tunnel back out last night

2. Vaughn mistakenly left the freezer door open, and the house actually warmed up a few degrees

1. When Santa dropped down the chimney, he paused, looked around, and said, “WTF, dude?! This place is freezing!”

A number of people have asked me over the past month or two for an update the Tooth Fairy Lockout. I apologize for going silent on this. The story took some curious turns, which is why I’ve held off on updating this until now.

Here’s a recap: After my son, Vaughn, lost his first tooth this summer, he openly questioned the Tooth Fairy. What I mean is, not the existence of the Tooth Fairy, but the value of her services. Once the tooth came out, he asked me what he might expect in return for putting the tooth under his pillow. He did some digging into the issue of the TF’s current payout. Other kids in his first-grade class came back with mixed reports: Some said they got special coins—a silver dollar or the like—but most said they got a dollar or two or some change.

Vaughn was not impressed. He has developed a habit through his first seven years of collecting things of significance on his desk in his bedroom: rocks that he’s found, a trophy, an expired credit card I left him have because he thought the design was cool. Now Vaughn wanted to know why he shouldn’t include the tooth in his collection—a part of his own body that had been useful to him over the past five-plus years. Especially when all would get in return was a few dollars at best—an ephemeral windfall that might land him some gum, or a Hot Wheel, but then would be gone. I tried talking to him about saving, but the idea that a few dollars today might yield a few more dollars in a few years didn’t do much for him at this point in life.

So he took a stand. He refused to put the tooth under his pillow. “It’s special to me,” he said.

The Tooth Fairy Lockout of 2011 sparked some interesting conversation. But I’ll admit that I also couldn’t resist having some fun with it, and I began to probe the depth of his convictions. We discussed, hypothetically, what kind of prize might convince him to give up the tooth. What if the Tooth Fairy, for example, could bring him, instead of money, a live corn snake as a pet? Or what if the dollar amount got bumped up significantly? He enjoyed these conversations, and I learned some things. Vaughn is sentimental, but more pragmatic than romantic. He has no clue about money yet, but he might have a really strong sense of what’s important to him, and in the end, isn’t that true wealth? Aren’t there lots of people everywhere who have little monetary wealth but are immensely rich in other ways?

Anyway, what happened was this: Ann accidentally threw the tooth away. She was hurriedly sweeping stuff off his desk, and the tooth, encased in plastic, was in the detritus somewhere. We think. There’s no other logical explanation for the tooth’s disappearance.

I got worked up about it and tried to mount a massive search. We spent some time digging around in there, but Vaughn was quick to call it to a halt. He shrugged and looked at me with his expression—eyebrows lifted, mouth set—that says, Well, what can you do?

If you love something, set it free, and all that.

So that seemed to be the end of the Tooth Fairy Lockout of 2011. But then, suddenly, there was another loose tooth, right next to the first one he lost, right in the center on the lower half of his mouth. We were poised to pick things up again where we left off.

We were down at his school, helping a group of other parents to build a new playground. He was hanging out with Ann, playing with the tooth, giving in to the seemingly irresistible urge to wiggle it around, and suddenly it popped out. Vaughn fumbled with it, like someone had tossed him a baseball when he wasn’t expecting it, and it dropped to the ground—and disappeared into a large pile of freshly delivered gravel. He and Ann frantically searched through the stones, but it was gone—the literal needle in the haystack.

Another odd twist, for sure. But this is far from over. Vaughn has still only lost two teeth. We have 18 or so more chances remaining to figure this thing out.

I never was a good negotiator. For forty-plus years I’ve been fumbling away everything from elementary-school lunch swaps to haggling efforts involving cars. No one ever taught me the tricks of bargaining, and maybe they wouldn’t have done any good anyways: Great negotiators, like rock-and-roll front men, are born, not made.

Maybe my son, Vaughn, 7, is different than me in this way. When one of his teeth came loose for the first time, Ann and I without thinking much about it told him about the tooth fairy, and he received this information in his typical fashion. A faraway look came over him. He stared dreamily out the living-room window at the back yard for a few beats, and then started machine-gunning us with questions. How does she know the tooth is there? Why do you leave it under the pillow? And so on.

The tooth popped free a couple of weeks later when he and I were standing in Joe’s Pizza II, and he immediately ran outside to show Ann. We all passed it around excitedly, and when we got home I put it in a zipper-lock bag for him. Vaughn took it into his room, to put on his desk along with his T-ball trophy, some expired credit cards he’d asked to keep, his pencil sharpener, his football-shaped piggy bank.

When he came out, he announced that he wasn’t sure he was interested in a visit from some unseen and supposedly beneficent entity. Specifically, he wanted to know what he was going to get in exchange for the tooth.

He explained: One of his first-grade friends, Mina, had gotten some unusual coins—“special ones”—for her tooth. But another buddy, Rowan, just landed some run-of-the-mill change.

“Just guessing here,” I said, “but I would think you’d get a dollar. Or so.”

“Well,” he replied. “In that case, I just wanna keep the tooth.”

The implication was clear: Some lame pile of coins just wasn’t going to cut it.

Thus began the Tooth Fairy Lockout of 2011.

This isn’t just about him being cutthroat. He is, in fact, a sentimental type. When the tooth first started to wiggle around he cried a bit, which he rarely does. This was not because it hurt but because, I believe, of an innate awareness of life’s impermanence. Vaughn liked his body exactly the way it was, thank you very much—and what was this? Something falling out, with him having no say in the matter?

And the least he could do, once it was gone, was hold onto it.

I subsequently asked a bunch of people what the going rate was, and heard everything from one dollar to five. I averaged it out and presented my research to him: Three bucks was a safe bet.

He seemed to have thought this through. Or maybe he just decided no amount would be acceptable. In any case, he seemed resolute. “I’ve already got a lot of money in my football bank,” he said. “I’ve got more money in there than the tooth fairy’s got.”

We are now a week into the lockout. Stay tuned.

Bottom row, middle: It was a keeper

Thanks, everyone, for the great response to the Lost Rights paperback quiz. I hope that even if you didn’t win, you felt sufficiently inspired to go check out the book. And if you do wind up with a copy, remember that I’m always happy to arrange to sign/personalize/consecrate it. I’ll do pretty much anything short of opening a vein into it.

The view through a bookstore window in upstate New York

Now, to the business at hand. The envelopes, please. The winners:

Jen Dvorak

Charlene Bickford

Christopher Russell

Sean Holcombe

Melanie Marchetti

Please respond by email (dmhoward@ptd.net) or in the comments section to let me know exactly how you’d like the book signed, and where to send it.

Thanks again for playing along.

Answer 8 or more of these questions correctly and you qualify for a signed, paperback copy of LOST RIGHTS. A total of five books will be given away. Winners will be chosen randomly by my seven-year-old son. The deadline for playing is 11:59 p.m. on Sunday, June 12. Winners will be announced here within three days of the contest’s end. One entry per email address.

The Quiz is closed! Stay tuned for winner information!

Curious about the stuff that instigates the sort of eccentric behavior outlined in the previous post? In the next month or so there are some interesting chances to learn about it—and in some cases, see it for yourself.

Beginning on June 14, for example, the Morgan Library & Museum, in New York City, is trotting out 30 of its treasures. There are Mozart compositions from when he was 5 years old. “These are the earliest documented works by Mozart anywhere,” the Morgan reports, “and an indication of the genius that would soon change music history.” You’ll see the original of the Stamp Act of 1765, which helped spark the American Revolution. A vellum copy of the Thirteenth Amendment, which banned slavery. An early manuscript of Don Juan.

One item isn’t even old: It’s a 1994 letter J. D. Salinger letter wrote after a three-week vacation in Europe. The missive was his last to Michael Mitchell, the close friend Salinger commissioned to create the dust jacket for the The Catcher in the Rye more than four decades earlier. “In it Salinger complains about his deteriorating eyesight, reports on his travels and the impossibility of finding ‘a decent, huge green salad’ in any European city, and concludes by telling Mitchell that he maintains his customary writing routine.” For Salinger’s ravenous fans, frustrated that so much of what happened in Cornish stayed in Cornish, the letter is a tantalizing glimpse into the life. For those who waited in vain for Salinger’s next great story, it’s also an epic tease.

***

It’s kind of astonishing to learn that plenty of important pieces out there are still unknown to us. The National Archives a little while back announced the identification of nearly 3,000 Walt Whitman documents written during his service as a federal government employee, starting in the 1860s. “This trove of information—conclusively identified as Whitman’s papers for the first time by University of Nebraska-Lincoln scholar Kenneth Price—sheds light on the legendary poet’s post-war thinking, as well as Whitman’s published reflections on the state of the nation that soon followed.”

As Archivist of the United States David S. Ferriero pointed out, “Such findings shape the ever changing nature of American history, and I hope researchers continue to share their wonderful finds with us.”

***

And a new book, Sacred Trash, by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, tells the story of a group of scholars who faced the almost unimaginable task of piecing together a massive jigsaw puzzle of historic documents in Cairo, some of them dated back around 900 years. The papers, in their entirety, brought to life a culture that would otherwise have been lost to history.

I haven’t had a chance to read the book yet, but from the Times review there’s this great passage, quoting one of the first people to examine the cache: “For centuries, whitewash has tumbled” upon the documents “from the walls and ceiling; the sand of the desert has lodged in their folds and wrinkles; water from some unknown source has drenched them; they have squeezed and hurt each other.”

Hang around this sort of stuff long enough, and you can feel the pain.

By any measure, Charles Goodspeed was a remarkable success in the field of rare-book sales during the first half of the twentieth century. He had a thriving Boston shop where he handled first-edition works of Twain, Dickens and other immortals. It seemed that it was only when he got his hands on historic documents—which he viewed as a natural companion to the books—that he encountered problems.

On one occasion, he had only recently finished cataloging a particularly fiery Edgar Allen Poe letter when he discovered it had vanished. The letter “may have been taken by a stranger, or the thief may have been one of my own assistants,” the baffled Goodspeed wrote in his 1937 memoir, Yankee Bookseller. “I never traced the guilty man nor do I know the present possessor of the letter.”

Dealers of historic documents, he noted, “are by no means infrequent sufferers from pilferers.”

And that was part of the deal—the collateral damage of delving into a curious side business that even many aficionados characterized as inspiring a kind of sickness. Document collecting “is a progressive malady” and a “restless demon,” the dealer Thomas Madigan observed. Julian Boyd, the editor of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, once commented that “one of the most insidious effects of the virus is that it often builds up an immunity to all counsel of prudence.”

Goodspeed’s customers in this realm tended to be oddballs—often exhibiting, as he put it, “examples of eccentricities bordering on, or within the limits of, insanity.” One regular, in fact, claimed to have conversations with Shakespeare. Not that that stopped Goodspeed; from that client he purchased, among other things, a letter written to George Washington from the first president’s mother.

It’s no wonder, then, that even with his decades of experience, the bookseller frequently stumbled trying to navigate this minefield. He once bought at auction the signed notation of Nathaniel Morton on the back of a will. It was an intriguing find: Morton was a pilgrim settler of Plymouth, keeper of the colony’s records, and secretary of the council of war in the campaigns against King Philip.

Goodspeed cheerily cataloged this new item, which “attracted the notice of an antiquarian who came into the shop, examined the piece, and went out,” he wrote. “Almost immediately the State Record Commissioner walked in and asked to see it. Did I not know that wills belonged to the public records and that I was violating a [Massachusetts] law in holding this ancient document?”

Goodspeed consulted his lawyer, but soon surrendered the document to Plymouth. “In the past,” he wrote, “the line between public and private papers seems not to have been drawn; it was of no one’s particular concern.”

As Wayne Pratt would learn decades later, in 2000, when he purchased a multimillion-dollar original copy of the Bill of Rights, that line can be even more difficult to divine today. (Read Lost Rights for the full story, if you haven’t already. Did we mention that it’s about to come out in paperback?) But had he bothered to plumb the dusty tomes of the document-collecting trade, Pratt might have absorbed a few timeless and hard-won lessons: Use respected dealers. Establish provenance. Avoid materials that may have been stolen.

There are scammers and forgers and thieves. There are government documents that may or may not be legitimately in private hands. There are backstories with enough half truths and outright lies to make a carnival barker blush. For an outsider to try to navigate these stormy seas—especially with a holy relic like an original Bill of Rights—is a highly suspect enterprise.

Pratt might have noted the bit of verse Goodspeed chose to open a chapter he titled “Caveat emptor”:

Will you walk into my parlour? said a spider to a fly,

‘Tis the prettiest little parlour, sure, that you ever did spy;

You’ve only got to pop your head within side of the door,

You’ll see so many curious things you never saw before.

Will you walk in, pretty fly?

Goodspeed knew as well as anyone: Sometimes, against all good sense, the fly finds it impossible to resist.

Who out there has been drawn to collecting something that proved troublesome?

There are astrologists out there who would have a field day with this one. Today—March 18, 2011—is the eighth anniversary of the FBI sting that serves as the dramatic climax of my book. For those of you who haven’t read the book (and what exactly are you waiting for, hmmm?), a quick summary: A multimillion-dollar original copy of the Bill of Rights had been offered for sale to the National Constitution Center, in Philadelphia. Problem was, the document had been stolen from North Carolina during the Civil War, and still belonged to the Tar Heels. One thing led to another, and an undercover FBI agent got involved, and figured out a way to lure the sellers into an office tower in Philly under the pretense of closing a $4.5 million deal. Eight years ago on this day, a few guys who thought they were going to get quite a bit wealthier instead were treated to the news that a half-dozen FBI agents had thundered into a conference room to snatch away the prized artifact. One of those would-be sellers was Wayne Pratt, an antiques-dealer superstar from Connecticut who was a regular appraiser on Antiques Roadshow.

But that’s not the only reason the date is interesting. March 18, as it turns out, also happens to be the very same day on which, one year later, Pratt appeared in a federal courtroom in Connecticut to plead guilty to tax-evasion charges. Those charges had nothing to do with the Bill of Rights; Pratt extracted himself from litigation involving the historic document after a few months and several hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of legal fees. No, his legal problems on this day in 2004 had much to do with his erstwhile best friend and partner in the Bill of Rights deal, Bob Matthews.

Back in 1997, Matthews had lured Pratt into serving as the straw man for the purchase of a Washington condominium. At that time, the condo belonged to Connecticut’s governor, John Rowland. Matthews was Rowland’s friend and a developer who did a lot of business with the state, and as a highly unethical favor, arranged for Pratt to buy the property at an inflated price. As most folks who live in the Northeast know, Rowland eventually resigned from office and spent a year in prison—the condo deal having been part of the case federal investigators built against him. Pratt never served any jail time, and Matthews was never charged.

So, what are the odds of that: The two worst days of a guy’s life—and they come on exactly the same day, one year apart. (When I interviewed Pratt’s wife, she told me she thought maybe she should barricade herself inside every March 18 for the rest of her life.)

The strangest part? Rowland was sentenced to his prison time the following year, in 2005. The date?

March 18. Cue the spooky music.

Tomorrow, December 15, is the 219th anniversary of the passage of one of the most important documents in human history. If you’ve got one of those comprehensive calendars that includes such things, you’ll be able to identify it as Bill of Rights Day. You don’t hear a lot about it—no one, not even bankers, get the day off—but it’s important nonetheless. The document’s prevalence in our daily conversation speaks to its overwhelming significance. If you don’t know the whole laundry list of what we all gained from that—freedom of speech, to gather, the right to a trial by jury, the right to bear arms, and on and on—it’s time to brush up on being a United States citizen.

Tomorrow’s an important day for me because I’ve been invited to talk about Lost Rights at the National Archives in Washington….after an event that has become a tradition there: a naturalization ceremony for petitioners seeking United States citizenship. Apparently it’s quite moving; I hope to be there to see it, and that my talk (with slides and questions), which kicks off at noon, isn’t too much of a letdown. I’ll be signing books afterwards, so please come and say hello.

Other notes:

One of the things I’ve heard from readers is that they wished there were photos. Which is fair enough: I always like to put a face to a person driving the action in a book. Fortunately, I have this blog, and in the coming weeks I’m going to roll images out there for people who have never gotten to one of my slide-augmented talks. It also helps—and speaks to the prominence of the folks in the book—that they continue to make news.

Here’s a recent story about Bill Reese, for example, with an excellent portrait and a couple of anecdotes I’d never heard before about his exploits (I’m sure there are many more). Reese, you’ll recall, is the prominent rare-books and documents dealer who tried to unravel the oddball backstory swirling around the Bill of Rights that he’d been asked to try and sell for $5 million.

And finally, thanks to my basketball buddy Lou for pointing out this story: “A historic document that details the original rules of basketball, written 119 years ago as a winter sport for boys of a Massachusetts YMCA, was sold for more than $4 million on Friday to raise money for charity.” That would be $4.3 million, to be exact. No it’s not the most important document in human history, but it’s highly meaningful to us on Mondays and Thursdays at the Lower Macungie Township gym.

As a Connecticut native who grew up 20 minutes from Storrs, home of the most dominant college basketball team in history, I’m not thrilled that the document is leaving New England. But Kansas? In the college-hoops realm, that’s not a bad alternative.

One of the most indelible characters in Lost Rights is a real estate developer named Bob Matthews. There’s no one in the story more polarizing than the bombastic, fast-talking, name-dropping, gaudy-new-money partner in the ill-fated Bill of Rights purchase.

Back in the 1980s and ’90s, his successes in real estate development—always accompanied by great fanfare of Bob’s own creation—also earned him some admirers, even while people cringed at his grating style. To be fair, many also benefited from his generosity with charitable causes (even if he also had ulterior motives when he bought tables at benefits). But when the real estate bubble of 2008 popped, Matthews’s empire imploded along with it—making him a pariah in many places where he has done business. He has been sued by numerous contractors who allege he stiffed them on payments. In Connecticut, one newspaper just reported that Bob is now one of the state’s top income-tax deadbeats, owing more than $1.6 million. Probably not a great chance of collecting that; Matthews decamped for Florida and Nantucket after word broke of his role in the scandal that sent Governor John Rowland to federal prison.

This month, Nantucket Magazine acknowledges the fascination with the man and the ever-expanding legend by excerpting a section of Lost Rights that focuses on Matthews. As the magazine’s intro notes, “Few summer residents of Nantucket have cut a wider swath over the past decade than Bob Matthews. From his lavish home, flashy parties, and high profile failure of his Point Breeze Development, Matthews’s persona has been a mix of P.T. Barnum, Harry Houdini, and Jay Gatsby.” The magazine calls the book “fascinating” and a “gripping tale.”

One final note: I’ll be in Washington, D.C. tomorrow at the University Club Book Fair from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. to sign books and chat with whoever’s around and interested. Come say hello!