Interactions of Script and Print in the Nineteenth Century
The Interacting with Print Research Group Presents:
‘Interactions of Script and Print in the Nineteenth Century’
The nineteenth century witnessed an explosion of printed matter in Europe, as new technologies such as the steam press and new distribution infrastructures such as the railway produced and circulated printed books in unprecedented numbers.  But manuscript was not simply superseded by print. Manuscript texts circulated alongside printed matter and intersected with it in a variety of ways.  Mounted in conjunction with the seminar ‘British Romanticism and the Survival of Manuscript Culture’ led by Prof Michelle Levy (Simon Fraser), this exhibition traces some of those interactions. Poets circulated works in manuscript before having them printed and readers remixed print culture by creating scrapbooks that were part print and part script. Handwritten commonplace books imitated the layout of printed pages and printed texts included facsimiles of handwriting or typefaces that imitated manuscript.  Readers marked the margins of their books, and gift books included presentation pages, which encouraged readers to write in the book.  Displayed together, the manuscript and printed texts in this exhibition survey a nineteenth-century media ecology in which script and print fed off each other in unexpected ways, generating new cultural possibilities through their mutual interactions.
