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As the first two sections of this exhibition have demonstrated, manuscript culture enjoyed a rich and varied life despite the ubiquity of print in the nineteenth century. The vitality of manuscript in the period is perhaps best captured in the ways in which it responded to, took inspiration from, adopted and adapted characteristics and conventions of the print medium. Writers producing handwritten documents show an awareness of design practices and are sometimes careful to reproduce layouts found in printed material. These decisions gesture toward a desire for formality and professionalism among manuscript producers and speak to how commercialism and mass production influenced individual artistic production in the period. Other scribes are highly selective: they poach images but discard printed text and replace it with a transcription or an alternative text. Meanwhile, in an appeal to tastes for the personal and the private, print impersonates manuscript. This section explores the cross-pollination of script and print aesthetics.

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