The Scarlet Letter Preface: The Custom House Summary

The narrator addresses his audience, describing a fictional three-year experience working in the Custom House (a building where people documented goods for import and export) in Salem, Massachusetts.
The Custom House is worn down and mostly staffed by people who have job security because their families fund their positions.
Not many ships come to Salem anymore, so life is kind of slow for our narrator, the customs agent.
He explains his discovery of certain documents, along with a dress bearing an embroidered scarlet letter A.
These manuscripts bear the story of Hester Prynne as documented by a man named Jonathan Pue. Pue (no relation to Pepé le Pew) was collecting local history some hundred years before our narrator’s time.
Our narrator decides to write out the narrative of Hester Prynne, but quickly realizes that his boring coworkers (who lead tedious lives and who can’t tell jokes to save their lives) are stifling his creative juices.
The narrator wonders whether his Puritan ancestors would scoff at him for wanting to do something as frivolous as writing a book to meditate on human nature.
The Custom House gets a new big cheese, and our narrator loses his job.
Turns out, losing his job is the best thing that could’ve happened to our narrator: he loses his writer’s block and is finally able to tell the tale of Hester Prynne.