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Rarely do politics and books overlap. Let me clarify: There’s plenty of politics in books, of course, and often what’s written is often the source of bitter partisan discourse. But what I mean is that the debate rarely extends to the actual physical object. For the most part, rational people gave up banning and burning books decades ago.

Today marks the release of former President Bush’s new memoir, Decision Points. To coincide with the book’s arrival, the people behind a website called Waging Nonviolence have called for its followers to go into bookstores and move the Bush book into the crime section (or horror, or humor, or whatever—you get the point). Once Decision Points has settled in between say, In Cold Blood and The Corpse Had a Familiar Face, the masterminds behind this plot suggest you take a photo of the new arrangement and post it on their Facebook page. This supposed form of nonviolent protest first cropped up earlier this year, when Tony Blair’s book came out.

Sorry, guys. It’s a dumb idea.

Let’s get this out of the way right here: This is not about politics. Anyone who’s been around me knows that I consider the Bush presidency to be an eight-year uninterrupted Dumpster fire. I already know enough about him to know that I’m not interested in reading his explanations and justifications for all that took place.

But that has nothing to do with this. The reason I don’t like the Waging Nonviolence movement is simple: I just don’t like people messing with books.

Part of the reason is economic. The publishing industry in general and the book business in particular is struggling mightily. Everybody knows that Americans don’t read as much as they used to; the last thing we should be doing is erecting any kind of barrier to a book purchase—any book purchase.

True nonviolence is, by definition, victimless. And there are certainly potential victims here: Many bookstores are hemorrhaging profits. Determined buyers who can’t find the book might simply go home and order it on Amazon, which will remain blissfully free of the Twitter-age merry pranksters. And bookstore employees will be stuck with the thankless, Sisyphean task of shuffling the title back to its proper place day after day. Those employees are people who might actually agree with the anti-Bush sentiments; why punish them?

I’ll admit that this is also personal. I’m still a little raw over my experience earlier this year, when my own first book came out. It’s not like Bush is going to face the same challenges I did (obviously), but the bookstore experience can be tough on first-time authors: Lost Rights routinely turned up filed on shelves it didn’t logically belong, like in the Civil War section. Many friends who tried to find the book often found it misplaced, or out of stock. Nothing I’ve ever experienced in publishing compared to the frustration of working on something for several years, only to have people unable to put their hands on it.

So maybe in this one way, I actually sympathize with Bush.

If you don’t like the former president or the smoldering remnants of his policies and decisions, there are plenty of means of legitimate nonviolent protest. Run for Congress. Start a PAC. Give a speech on a street corner.

Or go write your own book, and see what it’s like to try and get it out into the world, into people’s hands. Then you’ll gain a new appreciation for the lameness of this idea.

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A few months back, I wrote a blog post about the Copley Library sale. As I somewhat offhandedly mentioned, these sorts of sales can be the source of great hand wringing in academia and among public archivists who believe that significant historical materials will disappear into private vaults forever.

That’s understandable, and not without justification. In Lost Rights, I chronicled the heartbreaking loss of much important material; I also explained aftermath of the epic 1940s-era Biddle Sale, a series of auctions that broke up and scattered far and wide a collection of important letters written to and by members of the nation’s first Congress. The documentary historian Ken Bowling (who plays a key role in my story) has spent more than 30 years obsessively trying to find all of those letters in an effort to compile an accurate narrative of that era. That’s obviously not an ideal outcome for history, as Ken’s colleague Charlene Bickford pointed out to me in her comment to that post.

To some, the Copley Library appeared to be a kind of disturbing sequel. Sotheby’s tried to build immense hype around the event, partly in this overwrought, exclamation-point-filled video (“this material is of overwhelming significance”). The New York Times got caught up in it, labeling Copley Library an “astonishing collection” valued at $15 million—and indeed, it includes many of the biggest names in American history, spanning from Washington, Jefferson and Adams to Twain and Dickinson. Watching the video, and reading the catalog copy, one might be led to believe that we all run the risk of losing key historical materials to some miserly millionaire.

But the Copley Library—actually more of a private collection kept available to the public on a limited basis—is a different animal, not at all like the private collections that vaporized off of auction blocks over the past 150 years before historians knew better. Bill Reese explained as much to me. As readers of Lost Rights know, he is the eponymous powerhouse behind the William Reese Company, purveyor of eminent antiquarian books and documents. Reese told me that historians have had access to the collection for years, and the important threads weaving through our nation’s history have already been duly tugged on and unraveled for posterity. “The vast majority of the stuff is known to scholarship,” he says.

And in fact, much of the material of interest to researchers, authors and academics—far from getting hidden away in some reclusive eccentric’s basement safe—has already found its way into the public collections where it’s most appropriate, Reese says. “The Twain manuscripts, for example, ended up at [the University of California at] Berkeley, which is typical of what happened with a lot of them,” he says. Private collectors mostly focused on artifacts that tend to be either autographic (as in George Washington’s signature on the title page of a collection of Jonathan Swift materials) or redundant to academia (as in the copy of the Declaration of Independence that is identical to copies in six institutions). “No loss to scholarship there,” Reese says.

The Copley collection was far off the beaten track for scholars, so things of interest to them are now general more accessible, Reese says, while the objects of interest to the collecting world have been dispersed into private hands. “The market is going to bring everything to an equilibrium,” he says. “I don’t think we should be weeping any tears over this quote-unquote library.”

The sale continues this month with a number of lots involving Western Americana and Revolutionary and early-Federal period items. It concludes next April.

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For those of you who don’t have cable TV (is it possible I’m the only one out there in that category?) or just don’t sit around watching C-SPAN2 on Saturday afternoons in August: This video aired on Book TV a couple of weeks ago. The footage was shot at my book discussion at the venerable Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, DC back in mid-July (though it seems like about 10 years ago already, the pace of things has been so insane). It was great to be there, and an honor to be featured on the show.

For those of you who would rather see me in three full dimensions, I’ve scheduled a few other appearances in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, where I live; check the calendar on the “News and Appearances” page. Also, look for at least one event in New York City, and one or two more up on my native soil of Connecticut, to be announced in the coming days.

And, maybe most significantly, I’ll be returning to the scene of the crime of the C-SPAN video, so to speak, in December—when I’ll be the featured speaker at the National Archives on Bill of Rights Day. That would be December 15, to be exact. Come join in the conversation about the book, then go see a real live Bill of Rights—the federal government’s copy—on display.

Look for more updates, and more fun stuff (think book giveaways), soon.

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It’s not what you think, probably. But it’s still harrowing, all these years later, for me to recall one near-disaster that took place while I was researching the book. It comes to you courtesy of an interview published in the Accidental Extremist, a website created by my friend Christian DeBenedetti, the pleasantly twisted genius who created this site about other people’s travel-related calamities. Schadenfraude, the Rand McNally version. It’s good fun.

While you’re there, click on the June and July archives. The former includes an exceprt from my friend Kalee Thompson’s book Deadliest Sea, which came out in June and is doing very well; it’s a dramatic open-ocean rescue story I’ve mentioned previously. The latter features an entertaining-sounding book called The Lunatic Express.

On an entirely different note: The book continues to get reviewed, and not just by people I’ll never meet on Amazon. This review, in Fine Books & Collections, captures the whole thing nicely. I appreciate how the reviewier points out that I don’t hammer anyone over the head with morality judgments in the book. One of the things I enjoy doing as a writer (and editor) is finding characters who have good qualities who maybe do some not-so-great things, and letting people wrestle with them in their heads after reading. Here the writer accurately notes that I leave readers “to make their own conclusions from the material he presents.”

A bit late reporting this, but there was some great coverage of Lost Rights in North Carolina. Here are a couple of examples, one from the Raleigh News & Observer, and another from the Fayetteville Observer. (Nice line: “Nearly every page of Howard’s story will leave you with eyebrows raised or saying ‘wow.’”).

For people who have asked about future Lost Rights road trip events: There are a few additional events lined up—including two here in the Lehigh Valley, at the Nazareth Library (October 5, 6:30 p.m.) and the estimable Moravian Bookshop (September 11, TBA). Connecticut friends, watch the schedule; we’re working on getting a couple morelined up there in October, including one in the library of my youth.

Finally, just have to say this: Many fans will hold out hope for the Red Sox until they are mathematically eliminated in September, but Kevin Youkilis’s season-ending muscle tear is the back-breaker. The Sox had a great run with many key players broken and bloodied, but that man is the pillar they are built on, the ultimate blood-and-guts leader. I’ll be a Rays fan in the playoffs, because it’s amazing how much they do with so little, all while playing in a building that you could call a ballpark only in the sense that you can call a doghouse real estate.

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Like a lot of people, I guess, I’d always wondered: Once I actually managed to write the book, what would it be like going out into the world to talk about it? More specifically, what would the mythical book tour really be like?

Try to put yourself in that place for a second: You lived with this thing in your head for years. You fed and nurtured and watered it. You fought with it. You watched it grow. And then suddenly it’s out there, and people are free to buy it and make their own connection with it or to just pick it up and glance at it and put it back down. And then you’re out there among all these people—the vast majority of whom you don’t know—trying to explain yourself and your work. Yeah, why exactly did you decide to do this?

Tough to imagine, right? I know it was for me before it happened. The only way to adequately describe the experience, I think, is to take you along, starting last Monday, when I took off from my home in Emmaus, Pennsylvania bound for Raleigh, North Carolina.

6:44 a.m. In the car, on the road to the Philly airport. It’s an utterly perfect morning—very warm already, but not harsh yet. Would anyone in Raleigh care if I went to the beach today instead? I spend a few minutes of backroads driving trying to talk down the low-level, free-floating anxiety I always feel heading out on any trip alone—a wobbliness that gains traction somewhere deep in my gut thanks to today’s book talk. I don’t mind public speaking that much… but it’s such a great beach day.

7:23 On the Pennsylvania Turnpike, a van passes me with two coolers lashed down to some kind of platform attached to the trailer hitch. I spend a few minutes picturing which beach on the Jersey shore they’re headed to, how the sand and water will look. Then I rustle around for my iPod for a distraction.

7:33 For some reason, Lucinda Williams’s cover of AC/DC’s “It’s a long way to the top” always makes me laugh a little—but then I decide halfway through the song that it’s maybe not quite right for the occasion. I switch it to Ben Harper.

8:07 Philly airport: I realize I’m not used to trips of this duration—essentially about 36 hours… So, where do I park? That length of time seems too short for economy but too long for short-term. This seemingly insignificant question baffles me so much for a minute or two that I have to turn off the iPod. Ultimately I chose economy because I know the Southwest gate is close by, within a short walking distance, and I’ll save my publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a few bucks. Maybe, if the publishing industry is really on life support, hooked up to one of those loud, air-swooshing respirator things, this move will extend its life span by few seconds.

8:22 The boarding-pass machine spits out my ticket, and I see that Houghton has booked me “business select.” I’m big time! But what is “business select,” really? This is Southwest, after all—the airline of free luggage and cattle-call boarding. For now, at least, it means a coupon for a free alcoholic drink… for a 9:30 a.m. flight. What are we, in Brussels?

9:11 I get pulled out of the boarding line to get randomly frisked. Dude: Don’t you know I’m an author now? I’m business select!

9:13 After silently acquiescing to the frisking, I return to the line.

9:19 Turns out business select means that I get to board before most of the rest of the cattle—um, I mean crowd. I grab a front-row seat by the window; the other two seats quickly fill with women who pull out books. One is reading Steig Larsson (either The Girl Who Tore Those Warning Tags Off Her Mattress or The Girl Who Ate a Shwarma at the Mall, I didn’t quite catch the cover), and the other Janet Evanovich. I asked the Evanovich reader how she liked the book, and she mumbled something very self-conscious and apologetic about it being an easy beach read. It was weird—almost like she could read my thoughts. (DISCLAIMER: Anyone who purchases and reads a book in today’s world is a hero or heroine to me, and I make no judgments based on literary selections. Any attempt to insinuate such judgments is solely based on your own opinion and do not necessarily the views of Lost Rights or anyone connected to it.)

9:22 I find blurb about Lost Rights in Spirit, the Southwest Airlines magazine. The editors describe the book as “a wild adventure,” which is most excellent. Then I spend the next 10 minutes trying to divine the meaning and significance of the little gas-tank-type “Google hits” element on the page, which also includes a movie and a video game. (Lost Rights got 1,400 hits, which puts the gas-tank needle in a place where if you were driving you would be running on the fumes of your last fume of gas, and would sputter to a halt within 100 feet.) What’s the point of tallying the Google hits of things that aren’t available to the public yet? I’m not sure whether I’m irritated because the element doesn’t tell you anything useful (my opinion) or that it doesn’t reflect well on my fledgling book (probably everybody else’s).

9:58 I scribble notes on my talk, furiously crossing out lines and generally making a mess of the single-spaced print-out, then wonder: How am I going to read this thing? I spend a few wistful moments thinking about what a presentation from John McPhee must sound like. Good God.

11:37 At Raleigh airport, I find that my good friends in Houghton publicity have ordered me a GPS with the rental car. A GPS. Nice gesture, but… really? First of all, this just canceled out my savings from choosing economy parking back in Philly. But more importantly, I’m a guy who once hiked 40 miles into a Guatemalan jungle. OK, I had a guide equipped with several mules and a machete, but still. I pride myself on my adventurousness, my ability as a pathfinder, my acumen in figuring my way through. A GPS? Hah! Out of defiance and outrage, I leave it sitting on the floor of the car.

11:53 I can’t find the hotel. I double-back on the same road twice, banging the wheel. And then I get on my phone to call for directions.

11:55 The clerk says check-in isn’t until 3 p.m. My book talk is at… 3 p.m.  The conversation goes something like:

Me: “Can you get me in earlier?”

Clerk: “What time?”

Me: “I don’t know, 1:30?”
Clerk: “I can try, but we were full last night. Sold out, and check-out wasn’t until 11. So…”

Me: “The thing is, I’m an author, and I just flew in to do a thing at Quail Ridge today, and I need to get ready. So this is important.”
Clerk: (covers the phone to cough… or is that laughter?) “I’ll ask someone in housecleaning to get a room ready.”

12:15 I skulk around the Barnes & Noble across the street, find Lost Rights in the Civil War history section. Feeling peevish, I move one copy to the “beach reads” table. If they want civil war, I’ll give it to ‘em. On the way out, I find the alternative Indy Weekly has a nice blurb about my talk and book. First line: “This is fascinating.” So that’s it: People either get it or they don’t. There’s no in-between. Unfortunately, those who don’t often seem to be corporate behemoths like B&N.

12:32 Next door, at the mall, I find a stall selling schwarma in the food court—and it’s really, really good. No kidding.

1:20 Over at the hotel, the room is ready. I go into overdrive, do a quick 10 minutes on the hotel treadmill to get my blood moving, jump in the shower.

2:05 One of the employees at Quail Ridge recognizes me as I walk in, greets me as “Mr. Howard.” Weird! She says she expects a good crowd. It’s been anyone’s guess so far. I had 125 people come to my first event at the National Constitution Center in Philly, skewing my expectations beyond the thinnest tendril of reality. But the turnout in Washington, DC for the next one brought me back down to earth, with maybe 20 people in attendance.

2:25 As I set up the slide show, the Quail Ridge staff brings out extra chairs. I sit and wait in the back office with two dogs. This calms me. Someone comes back, hands me a bottle of water, and says there are about 75 people squeezed in.

3:08 The talk goes smoothly, lots of good questions. Hand it to North Carolinians—they love their history. This might be the highlight of the tour. In the crowd are several people from the book: Bobby Higdon, a criminal prosecutor from the U.S. attorney’s office; Dale Talbert, the lead lawyer on the Bill of Rights litigation from the North Carolina attorney general’s office; his colleague, Karen Blum. Plus, there’s Mike Hill from the state archives.

3:16 Signing books, I’m approached by a gentleman who asks me to inscribe a book for Gary Stern. I remember the name: a high-ranking official at the National Archives, one of many people I interviewed—but sharp, with lots of interesting things to say. Who is this gentleman, then? David Ferriero, he says. The archivist of the United States. “Um,” I say. “Hi. Thanks for coming.”

I will later realize, to my growing horror, that President Obama appointed David Ferriero as the 10^th archivist of the United States last year. (My research was mostly finished by that point, so I was only vaguely aware of this.) It was ludicrous that he is here—in the moment, it feels like the founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art going to see a crayon-on-butcher-paper exhibit. I stammer out a few other bland and forgettable comments, most of which I’m certain Houghton’s business-intelligence team, frantically trying to control me by remote from afar, managed to suppress from my memory in the same way that the spy bureaucrats erased parts of Jason Bourne’s brain. It would just be too debilitating for me to live on with the memories of that. However, I do remember becoming so befuddled that I had to ask David Ferriero his first name again—so I could sign the second book that he bought. God only knows what I wrote in there. Hopefully it was something like, “I’m not as idiotic as I look right now.”

4:05 I sit outside the Whole Foods, next to Quail Ridge, with Karen Blum. She tells me that I should be extremely pleased with the way the book has been received. “This is a tough crowd,” she says. She was an extremely cagey interview during the reporting process—she had to be, because there was ongoing litigation—so I’m immensely relieved when she says I didn’t miss anything important. It’s almost enough to get me past the David Ferriero episode.

5:50 I go driving around Raleigh, looking for something to eat, half trying to get lost. I find a cool place in a strip-mall kind of setting that appears to have updated variations on Southern comfort food. And so I sit there and eat oven-fried chicken and collard greens and mac and cheese baked into some kind of brick. Buzzing from it all.

6:55 Back at the hotel. What to do? I don’t have to get up too early, but I’m not very good right now at staying up late. Maybe I’ll go to a movie. Maybe I’ll sit in the hotel bar and get sauced.

7:40 I sit in the hotel lobby (because that’s where the free WiFi is—the Houghton remote control still working), jotting down notes from the day, just because all of this seems like something I should take some time to hold onto. Even though tomorrow I will drive 90 minutes down to Southern Pines, and I will do it all over again.

Everyone’s been telling me to try and enjoy it. Everyone. I may never write another book. Or if I do, there may not ever be another book tour. Probably a year or two from now, it will all happen on Skype.

So they’re right about that.

Still. All I can think about is that so far, it’s sort of like having a birthday, running for office, and enduring an endless Toastmasters session all at the same time. You keep going, and you hope you find your way through moments like when important people approach with your book and you have no idea who they are.

Maybe I need that GPS after all.

Leave comments if you want me more installments.

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Had a chance to stop in Politics and Prose, the venerable Washington, D.C., bookstore last night to talk Lost Rights. It was a nice little crowd, and it was great to have CSPAN there to film the discussion for a future edition of Book TV. But the undisputed highlight for me was that almost entire staff of the First Federal Congress Project turned out, giving me the chance to embarrass them by repeatedly pointing out how they played important roles in the story. I stopped just short of pulling the three of them—Ken Bowling, Charlene Bickford and Helen Veit—up to the lectern to answer questions. Didn’t want to put them on the spot. But it was a fun time, and thanks to everyone who came out.

Few updates since my last post:

Back on my old stomping grounds, George Krimsky of the Waterbury Republican-American wrote this fine column about Lost Rights, starting off by pointing out that the book “great summer reading” that answers “lingering questions about one of the most mysterious treasure tales of modern times.”

From down around Philly comes this write-up from a reporter who attended the event at the National Constitution Center and refers to Lost Rights as a “fascinating tale.”

Meanwhile, Lost Rights also landed this mostly positive take from the Christian Science Monitor that highlighted the book’s “strange twists and turns.”

And for anyone who didn’t catch me on the Colin McEnroe show last week, you can listen here.

More soon…

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“Lost Rights” now has occupied places on bookshelves all over the country for a full 48 hours, so far there have been no reports of fisticuffs breaking out over the last copy at the Sheboygan Barnes & Noble, no skirmishes between roving bands of  pro-Pratt and pro-Matthews partisans. So that’s good.

There have been a few nice things written in the media. The Morning Call, the newspaper of my adopted hometown, ran this piece really big in Friday’s paper, splashing my mug all over the front of the Life section. That was very cool. The review in today’s Dallas Morning News was quite complimentary, saying that the book offers “a down-and-dirty tour of the murky, sometimes ethically ambivalent universe of the high-dollar historic-document trade.” He calls it “obsessively detailed,” which I take as high praise. This piece in a Philly-area paper calls the book an “amazing saga.”

There are a few other good things in the works, some I can’t mention yet, some I can: Friends in Connecticut can tune in Tuesday around 1 to hear me discuss the book on Colin McEnroe’s NPR show.

The only sobering moment of the entire weekend so far came when I walked into one of my local Barnes & Nobles, looked for the book, and finally found the sole copy on hand placed on a shelf marked “Civil War.” Ugh. Not the right spot. Clearly. For a second, I considered loading up my blog with vitriol about the the intrinsic unfairness of a system hopelessly rigged against newcomers, and isn’t it crazy that Liz Gilbert gets a massive front-of-store display for “Eat, Pray, Love” when she’s already sold 70 trillion copies?

But Ann and Vaughn and I had some sandwiches at Fresh Market and had a fake tug-of-war over a chicken-salad sandwich no one ended up finishing. Vaughn and I laughed and bumped into each other just like we always do as we walked along the sidewalk heading back to the car, and then we drove home listening to Josh Ritter’s great album “Animal Years” and singing along with “Girl in the War.” Ann said something about what a beautiful and abstract storyteller Ritter is, and I agreed. And by the time we reached the driveway, I knew I wouldn’t write any of that. I’ve got nothing against Liz Gilbert—I wish her well and hope she sells another 10 trillion—and anything that gets people to buy any book in this time by definition has to be a good thing.

And then, the clincher: I got home and turned on my computer and all kinds of people were writing to tell me that they had found the book: people on Facebook, some that I know well and some that I know only vaguely; people who have been family friends for decades but who wouldn’t have otherwise gotten in touch, saying they were excited to read it; people who know me from my job as an editor at Bicycling but have no real grasp of me as a writer; a college friend telling me how proud our late, beloved journalism prof (RIP, William Sheppard) would be; longtime close friends who are absolutely laying down a full-court press on the book’s behalf; and a childhood acquaintance I haven’t seen in 25 years or more who had started reading the book and emailed me a line so flattering I can’t bring myself to repeat it.

They had all found the book despite the Civil War stocking error.

Lost Rights may not sell another copy beyond this weekend. I would still feel like the entire enterprise was all more successful than I ever could have imagined.

It hardly seems adequate, but: Thanks, everybody.

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The first time I said the word “book” in connection with the Bill of Rights, I felt odd, and extremely self-conscious. The word kind of hung on inside inside my mouth, feeling funny in there the way a word will when you’re trying to learn something in French that requires making something happen up inside your sinuses. I was sitting in my office in Emmaus, and I looked around to see if the door was closed. I was talking to someone I knew in North Carolina who was peripherally connected to the strange and still-very-distant-feeling story of the missing Bill of Rights. “I’m just wondering,” I said. “Do you think there might be a book in this?”

“In our Bill of Rights? I don’t know—I don’t really think so.”

It was a gut feeling, but I did.

That was early December, 2005. It had been more than 2 1/2 years since the “holy relic,” as the archivists call it, had found its way home—but still, no one had really figured out what had happened for all those 138 years that it had been missing. We knew that at the beginning of that journey it had sold for $5. At the end, it nearly sold for $4 million. We didn’t know all that much else, except that it had ended its travels in the hands of the FBI. To me, that sounded like a book, even if I didn’t know how to say so yet.

By this past Tuesday night, June 29, I pretty much had it figured out. Three days before the book’s official launch, I took part in a conversation about the book at Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center—the astonishingly beautiful museum that is deeply intertwined with the story. We had a lively chat in front of about 125 people; thanks to everyone who showed up, and to host Steve Frank and the rest of the crew there who put together an excellent program.

And here are a few images… Thanks to my longtime pal, the ultra-talented John Murray, for the photos.

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Big news for Lost Rights: The book gets top billing tomorrow (June 25) in a New York Times story focused on the oddball idea of beach reads built around antiques and antiquities. “When told with enough four-letter words and forensic research,” the article begins, “the back stories of antiques can make for the kind of nonfiction thrillers that publishers save up for summer release.” It’s written by Times antiques columnist Eve M. Kahn.

A description of Lost Rights as “one of this year’s page turners” then takes over the top part of the story. Ms. Kahn, incidentally, was referring to my book when she spotlighted the use of R-rated language. That’s fair enough—a couple of the key characters in the story, in describing people or situations to me, dropped plenty of F-bombs and other non-family-friendly terminology. This was a trade-off I had to make. Lost Rights may not be suitable for middle-school summer reading lists as a result, but it was important to me to portray the characters as accurately as possible.

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I’ll say this for book promotion: It can take you to some unlikely places. In the course of launching “Lost Rights” over the next month, I don’t expect to wind up anywhere odder than the Palm Beach Post gossip column, which is where a piece on the book just landed. The paper’s celeb reporter, Jose Lambiet, was interested in the dealings of Bob Matthews, one of the key figures in the story as the guy who put in half the money to buy the Bill of Rights. People up in Connecticut will also remember him as one of the central characters in the scandal that brought down Governor John Rowland.

It appears from the context of Lambiet’s story that things are not going too well for Matthews down in his adopted home city of West Palm Beach. Matthews is a fast-talking real estate developer who had set his sights on some massive, high-end hotel developments in West Palm and Nantucket before the economy collapsed, and it appears the entire enterprise caved in on him. But this is a guy who has shown remarkable ability to reinvent himself over the decades, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the phoenix rises from the ashes again.

While you’re here: There’s an entertaining piece just out in the Maine Antiques Digest about the ongoing Copley auction at Sotheby’s and the nearly three quarters of a million dollars spent on a letter by one Button Gwinnett, one of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence. Gwinnett is a sort of holy grail for people who try to collect documents signed by all 56; his writings are incredibly rare, and it’s not just because he never bothered to put pen to paper. As the story notes, he died at age about 42 “from his wound in a duel with pistols at dawn in 1777, while the American Revolutionary War still had years to go. Gwinnett was a Continental Congress delegate from Georgia. His island holdings were pillaged by various warring sailors, and perhaps his personal papers did not survive after his wife’s death, soon after his own. Their only surviving daughter died childless in 1784, according to Sotheby’s catalog.”

A duel. Pillaged by warring sailors. Zero descendants after his daughter. Makes you ask: How did anything survive?