PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

In the late eighteenth century, Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801) developed highly sophisticated material practices and representational strategies of interpolating handwriting into print. For the most part, he applied these practices and strategies in a specific genre of writing: his privately printed “manuscripts for friends.” This paper situates Lavater’s imagery of script, his insertions of handwriting into print, and his use of “manuscripts for friends” within media history. The deep sense of paradox that arises today, when a “manuscript for friends” appears in the middle of a printed book, turns out be a consequence of media developments that only began after Lavater’s age, in the first third of the nineteenth century.