pawing into history

On this day in 1469 Johannes Gutenberg died. Gutenberg, the first developer of a reliable movable type printing press, helped bring on, um, everything including this blog.

I was just reading that his black ink is still superdark and glossy after over 500 years, as if it were brand new. Never faded. To this day, no one knows quite how he did it.

Then I got to thinking about this guy, the monk who was writing this page when, apparently, his cat got into the ink and then walked across the page, just late enough in the page's progress to keep it, and not doing quite enough damage to justify starting the page over.



We all think this picture is about the mischievous nature of kitties, but really it's about how this monk saw a repeated impression of the same shape multiple times stamped in ink ... and for the millionth time in history didn't put it together.

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