Benjamin Harris printed three pages and left the fourth blank. On purpose. The idea, as I understand it, was that you'd write your own news in the empty space — what you'd heard, what your cousin in Salem said — and pass the sheet along. A newspaper you were expected to finish. That was 1690, in Boston, and the governor took against something in the first issue; four days later it was shut, and no second one came.

The part that makes me laugh in a rueful sort of way is where the one surviving copy ended up: in London, in the colonial office files, kept because somebody in authority wanted the evidence. So the only Publick Occurrences we still have was preserved by the people who stopped it. I have two copies of a novel on the shelf behind me; one was loved, dog-eared, annotated in pencil by a stranger who disagreed with the ending, and that's the one I'd save from a fire. Harris would have understood, I think — he'd left room for exactly that.