29 September—Today is the 336^th anniversary of an event that would give Donald Trump a boner if he . . . knew about it. Of course.

First, however, the very first issue of the very first multi-page newspaper—as opposed to single-sheet broadside—published in North America in any language (as far as is known) was Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, which hit the stands in Boston on 25 September 1690. It was in fact a broadside with a single fold, making it a four-page folio with letter-size pages. The back page was blank, having been reserved for advertisers who, however, didn’t step up to the risk. (The Monitor, on the other hand, has never solicited advertising. Because we could never get it.)

The only known copy of Publick Occurrences is preserved in what used to be known as the London Public Record Office, by the way, and is now the National Archives of the United Kingdom. To be clear, that’s the only known extant copy of the only issue of Publick Occurrences ever published.

And that takes us to Ayatollah Trump’s if-he-knew Viagra. Because the first and only issue ofthe intended monthlyPublick Occurrences in addition to not having a government-issued license and printing some truly fake but juicy news (e.g., French King Louis XIV sleeping with his son’s wife, who just happened to be dead at the time—likely published because the editor-publisher, Benjamin Harris, was notoriously anti-Catholic), also published real news about the Brits’ brutal treatment of French POWs that offended the British colonial governor.

So naturally the newspaper was closed down—effectively by executive order—a few days later, on 29 September, and all remaining copies were confiscated and destroyed. Wouldn’t Trump love to do that?!

There are several extant copies of the broadside suppression order, including the one pictured that’s in the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Mass. It’s easy to read, so you don’t need a transcript. Note the reference to “sundry doubtful and uncertain reports,” a.k.a. fake news:

There was never a paucity of ad hoc single-issue and short-run broadsides in the colonies, mind you, but it was almost 14 years—1704—before another newspaper was regularly published. That was The Boston News-Letter, published by Boston postmaster John Campbell that dutifully served as a mouthpiece for the crown, which even subsidized its publication at times. The Boston-basd Tory-Loyalist rag, which quite possibly could have survived a bit longer had it moved to in New York, folded in February 1776 . . .