The Magpie’s Gazette

“Cosimo . . . learned the art of printing and began to print some pamphlets or gazettes (among them The Magpie’s Gazette), later all collected under the title, The Biped’s Monitor. He had brought into a nut tree a typographer’s table and chase, a press, a case of type, and a crock of ink, and he spent his days composing his pages and pulling his copies. Sometimes spiders and butterflies would get caught between type and paper, and their marks would be printed on the page; sometimes a lizard would jump on the sheet while the ink was fresh and smear everything with its tail; sometimes the squirrels would take a letter of the alphabet and carry it off to their lair thinking it was something to eat, as happened with the letter Q, which because of its round shape and stalk the mistook for a fruit. . . .”

—Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees, 1959.