Gardier, D.

At the end of every day, D. Gardier carved the stray hairs from his shaving brush into tiny animal figures and left them on his windowsill. By morning, London’s sparrows had carried most of them off, so he started carving them larger—still under four inches—and inked each one on a woodblock to print on scraps of old ledgers. Those prints, tucked between tax receipts and grocery lists, became a quiet archive of everyday creatures. Find one in the corner of a 1742 grocery list at the British Museum and you’ll see a sparrow mid-hop, its feet barely leaving the page.