In ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1845) Edgar Allan Poe described how a woman hides a secret letter. When a guest arrives, instead of concealing the letter in a drawer, she places it upon a table in view. Her guest, much interested in the letter's contents but initially unaware of its whereabouts, quickly induces from her nervous behaviour that it must be close by. Then, suddenly, he ‘fathoms her secret’. He sneaks the letter out and, once home, repeats the exact same disguise tactic the woman had employed. When the police arrive to comb his place inside out, they begin looking for a space where the letter could be concealed without noticing it resting in a card-rack on the mantelpiece. As the detective Dupin in Poe's story tells us, the mistake the police thus make is to assume they know how things are hidden. Upon entering the thief's home, they know exactly what the letter looks like – its measurements, estimated weight, and so on – and presume that it must be concealed somewhere. The thief did no such thing, however. He disguised the letter by putting it in full view in an envelope redirected and resealed. Recovering the hidden truth about texts, Poe could have thereby implied, is perhaps not so much a cognitive affair (of uncovering concealment) as an experiential endeavour (of unmasking disguise).