Most famous is actor Paul Roebling's reading of an obscure letter from a Union officer named Sullivan Ballou.
At the top end, hereditary dukedoms could go for many millions; at the bottom, a few obscure imperial letters for a few thousand.
AT&T's overly aggressive government lobbying effort boomeranged as news reports questioned obscure support letters and whether those writing understood the merger.
But on Jan . 17 he happened to type the name into a search field on eBay, saw a listing for an obscure handwritten letter signed by Calhoun in 1823, and recalled having seen it somewhere else.
Baker offers lists of obscure two-letter words that are legal in Scrabble (ai, bo, xu), some instructions for doing cryptic crosswords, and amusing proverbs or insults, of which my favourite was the splendid Australianism: "The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead".
In 1910, an obscure market letter-writer named Harold E. Boericke started his own brokerage.
A lot of what's stolen seems obscure -- a letter to a Civil War saddle-maker -- but can be worth hundreds of dollars on the collectors' market.
After he was released he devoted himself to the detailed textual analysis of an obscure document: a letter from a 19th-century critic, Vissarion Belinsky, to the novelist, Nikolai Gogol, criticising his "sermons" in a country where serfdom was tantamount to slavery.
He realised that wearing a Lonsdale T-shirt with part of the brand name obscured leaves the letters "NSDA" showing, and if you're a historian, a German or a racist, you'll know that's an acronym for Hitler's Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter party.
