One day in France in 1905, a tiny tragedy occurred. A small fly, attracted to a delicious pool of water, got too close to the surface, fell in, and drowned. Like the proverbial tree in the forest, the death of this insect made no sound and would have likely escaped all human attention if not for one thing: this was no ordinary pool of water. This was a papermaker's vat. Following its untimely death, the fly's body was mixed into the slurry of water and paper fibers in the vat, a thin layer of which was then left to dry on a wire screen, becoming a piece of handmade paper.
We discovered this poor creature on the title page of a book of printer's ornaments, titled Flosculi Sententiarum: Printers Flowers Moralised. At first, it wasn't clear how it met its demise. Did it get squished during the printing process? Did a reader close the book on it? Or was it part of the paper? Using a cheap pocket microscope and phone camera attachment, we examined the page and were able to see paper fibers clearly lying over the corpse of the fly, indicating that it had fallen in during the paper-making process. A second fly appears to have met the same fate later in the book.
According to the colophon, Flosculi Sententiarum was produced in 1967 by the Gehenna Press, a well-known fine press, using paper made in 1905 and bought by a dealer in 1959. Fine press bookmakers like Leonard Baskin at Gehenna are known for their fastidiousness and high aesthetic standards, so it is somewhat of a mystery why they would have used paper with a dead bug in it, and on the title page no less. Perhaps they felt it added character.
To view the book, bugs and all, request Presses G274basf online and then come to our reading room.
