For centuries, handwriting served as a powerful tool for communicating information, preserving knowledge, shaping identity, and building empires. In our digital world, however, fewer and fewer people can read handwritten words.
Handwriting has survived disruptive technologies before. The invention of printing did not diminish the need for handwriting. Instead, it created new markets for ambitious printers and entrepreneurial writing teachers. These men and women used advances in print technologies to widen the influence of handwriting in everyday life.
A Show of Hands focuses on people, cultures, and technology to illustrate how handwriting has been taught, reproduced, and reimagined over the past five hundred years. Displaying a range of books and manuscripts from the Newberry’s collection, the exhibition makes the role of handwriting in the age of print newly legible.
Tue - Thu 10am - 7pm
Fri & Sat 10am - 5pm
Sun & Mon CLOSED
Free & open to the public
Trienens Galleries
The Newberry
60 W. Walton Street
Chicago, IL
41.900114364249, -87.63060135
A Show of Hands: Handwriting in the Age of Print
