In 2000 artist Maureen Cummins purchased a shoebox of about 100 love letters at a flea market in Manhattan, all written to the same man between 1906 and 1908, and most of them addressed to Far Rockaway, New York. Attracted by the physical beauty of the writing and the stationary she purchased them largely unexamined. Upon reading them she discovered that the writer was, in fact, another man. In Cummins' words, "... they constituted a rare and precious treasure, being both an engaging testament of unrequited love, and a fascinating record of homosexual life in the early twentieth century."