A newspaper is lumber made malleable. It is ink made into words and pictures. It is conceived, born, grows up and dies of old age in a day.

Bishop compresses the entire life cycle of a daily newspaper into a single day, stressing both its physicality and its ephemerality. By calling it “lumber made malleable” and “ink made into words and pictures,” he foregrounds the transformation of raw materials into a public artifact—something manufactured, shaped, and distributed at speed. The final sentence emphasizes the newspaper’s paradox: it is intensely laborious to produce and socially consequential when fresh, yet it becomes obsolete almost immediately. The line also hints at journalism’s relentless rhythm—each edition is a birth, a brief maturity in readers’ hands, and a rapid aging as tomorrow’s news arrives.