The history of typographical bleeping

“A few days ago, I wondered in passing about the origins of typographical bleeping, in which asterisks or hyphens or underscores are substituted for certain letters in order to avoid violating lexical taboos. Greg Hanneman emailed an example from 1869, and this caused me to do a small search that pushed it back to 1688 1680. No doubt some readers will be able to push it back further.” (Thanks kottke.org!)