When the editor of the South Carolina Gazette wanted to describe the “join or die”  snake then in use in newspapers in Pennsylvania, he had to improvise because he didn’t have a printing block with the image cut on it.

The result was something that would have made Lawrence Sterne happy: the use of text – here a group of lines – to represent the image of a snake. With the letters for the names of the American provinces added to the Gazette’s image, one could easier imagine what the imagine was supposed to be.

South Carolina Gazette, 22 August 1754