Apropos of Nothing Profound on the Fourth of July

The New York Times has a reproduction of the Declaration of Independence on the back page of the Business section today.  It has been a long time (maybe never?) since I tried to read the script itself.  I was admiring, among other things, the calligraphy, and thinking about how the calligrapher would have dealt with errors.  To my delight, I discovered that there are two insertion carets in this draft, one in the sixteenth line from the top (an “en” was missing from “Representative”) and one eleven lines up from the bottom (the word “only” is inserted in front of “by repeated injury”).

[Jeff Lipshaw]