The illustration (by Grandville) appears in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels: “These bits of wood were covered on every square with papers pasted on them, and on these papers were written all words in their language… but without any order… The pupils… took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty six fixed round the edge of the frame, and giving them a sudden turn, the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed…” (more in Janet Zweig’s paper Ars Combinatoria. Mystical Systems, Procedural Art, and the Computer, Art Journal, fall issue, 1997 (PDF).