La penna in mano. Per una storia della cultura manoscritta in eta moderna

摘要

A purposeless watershed in the history of scholarship is caused by the impact of printing on the transmission of texts, since, increasingly from 1450 onwards, 'books' became printed artefacts; as a consequence, much work in the field of palaeography, or the study of written documents, draws a line after the year 1500 and goes no further. Curiously, people at the time carried on writing all the same, since publishers had a distinct monetary interest in having as many readers as possible and it was hardly possible to prevent them from also becoming writers. The present work, an important one, picks up the baton where most palaeographers let it fall and describes the history of writing up to the early twentieth century, when gradually the pen gave way to the typewriter. Initially people wrote with the same instruments as medieval scribes, parchment, or paper, and goose-quill pens; just before 1830, several different manufacturers, of whom James Perry took out the earliest patents, perfected a method of stamping pen-nibs out of thin sheets of steel, and consequently Birmingham became a world leader in the pen-making industry. It was a genuine revolution, requiring the use of newer, smoother paper from the Fourdrinier machine, and different, non-acidic ink, allied to new practices such as printed headed notepaper. Specific chapters are also dedicated to autograph collecting and the history of graphology. The present book benefits from the absolute passion of the author for his subject and his extensive first-hand knowledge of the artefacts he describes, while the illustrations are taken from his own large personal collection. Very appropriately, the work is dedicated to the memory of Armando Petrucci (1932-2018), who was the first to say that the history of writing is something larger than just palaeography.