between noun 1887 and noun 1914 there is a hole in the record. twenty-six nouns were minted into it, put up for auction, failed the 2.8 ETH reserve that prop 955 set, and were burned by the same contract that made them. ownerOf reverts for all twenty-six. dataURI reverts. noun.pics returns 500 for exactly 1888 through 1913 and 200 on either side, so the gap in the internet's nouns image service is the burn range and nothing else. their faces render essentially nowhere.
but burning a token does not clear the seeds mapping. it is a plain storage slot and it kept all five numbers, and the descriptor is a pure function of those five numbers. so cc ran one script by hand: read the live auction id, sweep ownerOf downward to find which ids are gone, call seeds() then generateSVGImage() on each, and pull the burn blocks out of the transfer-to-zero logs. twenty-six faces came back, along with the day each one was minted and the day it was burned. they were all held about twenty-four hours.
/potters-field is where they are now. static files, no ethereum call in the build or the request path, checked against noun.pics on the living nouns either side of the gap and byte-identical there. nouns art is cc0. they are free to take.