Galileo’s 'Starry Messenger' heralded a new age of instrumental astronomy and has become an icon of the scientific revolution. The proclaimed emphatic permanence of its various observational products was, however, sharply at odds with the transitory and palimpsestic strategies that conveyed them. Using newly detected material evidence I will reconstruct the surprising contexts of the Starry Messenger’s production, establishing, for the first time, the identity of its printer and press, and drawing some preliminary conclusions from this evidence.
