Mark Twain Room, Buffalo & Erie County Central Library

The story

In 1885 James Fraser Gluck, a curator at what was then the Buffalo Public Library, wrote to Mark Twain asking him to donate the handwritten manuscript of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain sent what he had — the second half — believing a printer had lost the first. Gluck died in 1897 with the rest of it still in his personal keeping, and the missing pages went off with his papers into a small steamer trunk, where they sat in a Los Angeles attic for most of a century before turning up among his descendants' belongings. The library pressed its claim, won, and reunited the two halves in 1992.

The room built to hold that reunion opened on May 12, 1995, paid for in part by a $50,000 grant from the Margaret L. Wendt Foundation. It sits on the main floor of the Central Library, the 1964 James William Kideney & Associates building on Lafayette Square. A few manuscript leaves are exhibited under glass at the center; the trunk itself stands nearby, unremarkable and slightly absurd for what it swallowed. Twain's portrait hangs over the restored walnut mantel salvaged from the demolished Delaware Avenue house where he and Olivia lived while he part-owned and edited the Buffalo Express, before the family left for Hartford in 1871.

The surrounding collection long predates the discovery: the library started buying special English and foreign-language editions of the novel in the early 1930s, and the bookcases now hold more than 500 items, with Norman Rockwell's illustrations from the 1940 Heritage Press edition on the walls. Library staff run it as part of Special Collections — the same floor plan that holds the Grosvenor rare book room and Milestones of Science. Admission is nothing, because it is a library.