JAMES FENIMORE COOPER

A handkerchief narrates its own life - from the flax field in Picardy, through a Paris workroom where a girl embroiders it into a fortune, to New York, where it is bought by people who need to be seen with it. Cooper was thrown out of Yale for a prank with gunpowder and wrote his first novel on a bet with his wife; this 1843 satire on American snobbery is the strangest thing in his shelf, and it is very sharp about money.