Museum of the Imaginary & the Impossible: Stolen Convicts' Letters Collection

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(#123.2) The Convict Letter Collection

This description appears on pages 188-189 of the guide to the
G.R. "Joe" Gebors Museum of the Imaginary and the Impossible*
The physical location of the collection is just south of Savannah on Tybee Island, Georgia. 

Catalogue #123.2  Received by Museum:  5 July 1957.  Originator:  Eric Mintz , born Erich Mintz in Paterson, New Jersey, 1830; died Archer City, Texas, 1913.]

Short Description:  Mintz’s leather-covered wooden steamer trunk (ca. 1855), with its contents of of undelivered, stolen letters from convicts under prisoner warder Mintz's charge.

• Trunk:  wood and leather with metal clasps (broken). 32x28x44”. 
  
• Trunk Contents: 2,412 letters, including 112 self-folding envelope letters; 2300 letters in "modern" envelopes; 1 volume, “Diary”, with dated entries from 1850 to 1892..

Summary:

Mintz was a prison guard for more than half a century and “collected” letters that were written by convicts and entrusted to him for delivery to postal officials.  He performed the acceptance part but ignored the delivery and simply kept all of the letters.  Over his many years Mintz accumulated some 402 letters.  All remained unopened.  Mintz’own diary--a scandalous affair of mostly repetitious, feverous, arithmetical nightmares in which he recorded his counting of one through ten many thousands of times--reveals that he stole the letters because he “liked the way they felt”. In our experience we have seen that people can be committed to deep and long-term heinous aberrations--like this--without very much thought at all as to why they're doing it.  Mintz may or may not have collected money for postage; though even then the remuneration for theft over such a long period of time--and committed in such a way as to cause extended suffering for those waiting responses that were never to come--would have been insignificant.  There is also no evidence that he held the email "for ransom".

Mintz worked in 13 jails in 7 cities in two states, and collected letters from felons convicted of crimes such as wire cutting, brand stealing, chicken gutting, soil teasing, indiscretions with hoofed animals, stump mangle, murder, arson-murder, fright-murder, and wanton abduction. The letters, dating from 1850 to 1910, and ranging in locations from San Francisco to San Antonio, were found intact in a trunk in the estate of Samul Wundt, a trunk collector.  The letters--still unopened--are now all subject to inspection in a court of law to settle the question of ownership resulting from multiple lawsuits between the Mintz heirs (to recover all of the letters), the Wundt heirs (to recover the trunk with the letters), the descendants of the persons writing the letters (to recover the letters), and the state of California (saying that the letters belonged to the state because they were stolen by a California resident of California residents).  All in turn sued the state of California for allowing the thefts to occur.  There was one lawsuit filed against New York City, which was deemed responsible for the entire series of events because the city government invented the use of ships as prisons. This puts the Museum in a frightful place; we will not be a party to any lawsuit and will abide by the court's decision(s).

Mintz died in 1913, a suicide, in Archer City, Texas, by swallowing a deputy’s badge.  

*Just to make sure, the Museum of the Imaginary and Impossible is my own fiction.  Everything else on this blog is factual.