In response to an event in the Soviet Union in 1953 George Orwell wrote, “He who controls the present controls the past, and he who controls the past controls the future.” He was referring to an incident that involved a strategic adjustment to a book. Stalin had just died, and Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, the chief of Stalin’s secret police, had fallen out of favor. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, issued since 1926, had a positive article on Beria that was now an embarrassment. This meant that the article had to be amended. Rather than reprint the entire encyclopedia, which would have cost time and resources, the Soviets instead found a cheaper solution: to write an addendum page—an extended article about the Bering Strait—and then send it to all registered owners of the volumes, with instructions that they should paste the new page over the Beria article, thereby obfuscating it.1 The motivations for issuing this new article were clearly political (expunge Beria!) and economic (do it cheaply!). Speed was also a motivation: the paste-over allowed the book to keep pace with events in a manner faster than making a whole new book.