Il secretario , a sixteenth-century guide for princely secretaries, was, it seems, not written but plagiarized by Francesco Sansovino, son of Jacopo Sansovino, the Venetian architect. Francesco, “a printer, a rewrite man, a writer, and a popular izer,” had selectively excerpted and printed under his own name those portions of Il principe , a 1561 treatise on the train ing of princes by Giovan Battista Nicolucci (Il Pigna), esteemed secretary to Duke Alfonso II d’Este, pertaining specifically to the secretarial arts. 1 Sansovino printed Il secretario , the first of many such manuals that appeared during the Baroque period, in four volumes in 1564 and then seven in 1579, subsequent to which the work was issued in thirteen more editions through 1608. Perhaps the work’s popularity was due to its promise to those aspiring to serve as secretaries to princes and nobles, sequestered in rooms off to the side but with access to private apartments above, and exerting a quiet, mighty power, to “show and teach the way to write letters in proper fashion and with art on any subject whatsoever.” 2 Following detailed instructions on how to write to popes, kings, cardinals, as well as to one’s father, the treatise’s first book ends with instructions on folding and sealing letters to addressees of different social standing. 3 As Bernhard Siegert points out in Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System , the folding of letters dates to the widespread use of paper as an epistolary medium in the late medieval period, following which anything that circulated on unfoldable parch ment was in effect a public document, while anything that cir culated as a sealed letter was a possible source of courtly intrigue. According to Siegert, with the arrival of printing presses, what might have previously been a distinction between publicly legi ble parchment and privately enfolded royal instructions now divided into two paper-based techniques: typography and chi rography, or handwriting. Whence, a folded letter could follow its destiny to become, as Siegert puts it, an instance of what Michel Foucault calls, after his seventeenth-century sources, raison d’etat (state reason), or governmental rationality. 4 Some time ago, Gilles Deleuze showed that folding was