Colophon

The baron in the trees

It was after I struggled with what to call a blog and rejected many ideas that I picked up the dusty paperback, and flipped toward the denouement of a fairy tale read long ago. As I felt the beginnings of my own adaptations overcoming me, I began to realize that the solution might be to write:

In fact, it was at this very period of dementia hat he 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 Bipeds’ 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 they mistook for a fruit, so that Cosimo had to begin some of his articles with Cueer and end them with C.E.D.

Italo Calvino, Il barone rampante
(The baron in the trees)