One of the great ironies in the history of printing is that the most common prints of centuries past are often the rarest today. After all, who keeps an advertising flier or last year's calendar? The sheet is the upper half of a calendar for 1563, printed in Zurich. It provides all sorts of useful information on saints' days and astrological signs, weather and the movement of the planets, carefully arranged underneath a truly bizarre scene of domestic upheaval --- all neatly and carefully printed in not one but two colors. The work's very epehermerality makes it all the more striking to see the care that the printer and publisher have lavished on the printing of so "minor" a work. That fact alone speaks volumes about the sophisticated printing culture of 16th-century Zurich.

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