"In the nineteen-sixties, Elisabeth Mann Borgese, a daughter of Thomas Mann, trained her English setter, Arlecchino, to type with his nose on a specially constructed electric typewriter.After about a year, and many dispensations of raw hamburger, Arli could type twenty simple words. He made a lot of typos, though, and when Borgese tried to induce him to record his own thoughts, without dictation, he got discouraged and started smacking the machine with his paw. Borgese sent some sheets of Arli’s typing to a poetry critic, who wrote back that the dog had “a definite affinity with the ‘concretist’ groups in Brazil, Scotland, and Germany.”

[Joan Acocella: The Typing Life, in: The New Yorker, 2007; RTWT]