Tomorrow, a 100 year old mysterious package will be opened in a museum in Norway

Handwriting is an amazing thing.

But please for heaven's sake do not consider great handwriting to be a sign of intelligence or greatness as a value in itself. This sort of thing destroys kids in their early days. During my days in school(In India). Good handwriting was considered a mandatory trait of good, brilliant and hard working students. Any body who didn't have good hand writing was automatically considered a bad student.

The net result was kids with genuine brilliance, appetite for hard work but with a bad handwriting struggled. Some times forced to imitate their class mates in a bad way. I was a big victim of it. In fact the head mistress called my mom and told her, every thing was brilliant about me and if only I could have great handwriting I could score higher than everybody else. The worst part of it was I took it seriously, I had convinced myself no matter how hardworking or intelligent I was I didn't deserve to score well as I didn't have a good handwriting.

It was not until a couple of years later. During my pre university days. My uncle cleared my mind of all this. He convinced me that good handwriting discipline is nothing great in itself. Although its good to have one. But greatness lies in what you write and not how you write it.

Later I developed how to write in script with separate letters without joining them as in cursive writing. It greatly increased readability. But people around me used to find that strange and some even suicidal for a student.

Its basically what Leo Tolstoy said:

What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.

My guess is that it is collection of letters by people about the historic value of the day. It must be something boring like that otherwise he would have kept it for himself.

Anyone else remember Al Capone's vault?

For what it's worth, I have (older)relatives in Sweden who still write like that, with a ballpoint pen. So i don't think it's necessarily that it was written with a fountain pen, although they may have learned with a fountain pen and just continued writing that way.

That's simple. Dip and fountain pens allow you to create lines of different thickness, which can result in interesting calligraphy. It's simply impossible with ball pens which produce constant thickness lines.