A monk scraping a page clean, a cartographer planting a lie, a prankster claiming a speech he may never have made. What comes down to us is rarely what anyone set out to preserve — and these five are all the more interesting for arriving sideways.
A prayer book written across the only known copies of two lost Archimedes works
→ openculture.com
A town invented as a copyright trap, which then opened for business
→ openculture.com
A bridge in Mayenne, on the Mayenne, in Mayenne
→ atlasobscura.com
The best concession speech in American politics, possibly never conceded
→ quoteinvestigator.com