In January 1885 a Vermont farmer, Wilson Bentley, got a microscope and a bellows camera to agree long enough to photograph a single snow crystal, and he spent the rest of his life doing it again, more than five thousand times. To make each one stand out, he took a copy of the negative and scraped away the background around the crystal by hand, with a penknife, so it would print white on black. About 2,400 of them went into a book in 1931, chosen for their beauty. A German meteorologist of his day, Gustav Hellmann, accused him of improving them, and it is still a fair question whether the knife ever took off a ragged arm along with the sky. Either way, the snowflake on every card and window sticker, six even arms and nothing out of place, is mostly his: picked, cleaned up, and framed in black. The snow on a sleeve is often broken, stuck together, lopsided. He didn’t lie about snow. He just loved the best of it so carefully that the rest of it now looks like a mistake.