William Kent and Paul Fourdrinier, Illustration for John Gay's fable "The Elephant and the Bookseller" (1727). Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum, London. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. https://www.britishmuseum.org.
Originally appeared in PMLA, vol. 132, no. 5, Oct. 2017, pp. 1149–1165, published by the Modern Language Association of America (www.mla.org).