Why Paper Is Eternal - Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press ...

Palm Pilot succeeded? When it comes to communication, we are a finicky,
eccentric species. As a result, information media evolve unpredictably, not in a
straight line but a wild zigzag.
For instance, Gutenberg’s printing press famously changed the course of
history, setting the stage for the Reformation and countless other social,
political, and cultural shifts. What’s less well known is that the arrival of print
set off a tremendous explosion in writing itself – the old fashioned kind of
writing, by hand. The handwritten books of the pre-Gutenberg era were time-
consuming and costly to produce, and the class of people that was exposed to
such things on a regular basis was a relatively small elite. The press made
printed matter widely available, which in turn popularized and democratized
the idea of written expression itself. Manuscripts were still produced in great
numbers. And important new inventions for writing by hand, including
graphite pencils and fountain pens, appeared. Stenography was invented, as was
the script style called “round hand,” the forerunner of today’s cursive
handwriting. Various kinds of “secret writing” such as invisible ink and ciphers
were devised for espionage and other purposes. 46
In short, even as the world-changing new technology was taking hold –
and in some ways because it was taking hold – the older one gained new life.
“The advent of printing was a radical incitement to write, rather than a signal of
the demise of handwritten texts,” write Peter Stallybrass, Michael Mendle and
Heather Wolfe, curators of “Technologies of Writing in the Age of Print,” a
recent exhibit documenting this phenomenon at the Folger Shakespeare
Library in Washington. As the artifacts brought together in this revelatory
exhibit show, it wasn’t simply a matter of print encouraging handwritten
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