I keep some of my grandmother’s letters in a shoebox. But I do not do the same with the WhatsApp messages my mother sent me. They are not deleted. They are unfindable, unsaveable, lost in digital noise.
Why does one have so much value whilst the other is a fart in the wind?
The University of Leiden digitised its medieval manuscript collection. You can scroll endlessly through densely written, meticulously neat pages. What strikes you is the regularity. Every s has the same curves. Every u the same thick belly. Often the colophon lists how many scribes worked on the manuscript. Sometimes two, often more.
Writing was never solitary. It was collaborative work towards a shared goal: preserve and transmit.
Around 3500 BCE, people in what is now Iraq developed cuneiform script. Thousands of years of script followed. Countless variations of hand, pen, paper.
Now you are happy to receive a birthday card your family bought online at Hallmark. Often they just message you with ‘condolences’ or ‘congr…
