On May 31, 1997, Daniel Lombardo drove from his home, in West Hampton, Massachusetts—a small hill town above the Connecticut River—to the Jones Library, in Amherst, where he has worked as the curator of special collections since 1983. The Jones Library has a privately endowed collection of local historical and literary documents, and Lombardo has devoted much of his professional life to Amherst’s most famous resident, Emily Dickinson. He is the author of a recent study, “A Hedge Away: The Other Side of Emily Dickinson’s Amherst.”