Caltech-Huntington Seminar in American Studies

Wittgenstein claimed that we cannot see what is familiar, because it is always before our eyes. Printed forms are both familiar and invisible in this way. So invisible that we don t usually notice how strikingly innovative they are. When we talk of manuscript and print, it s hard not to imagine manuscript as the technology of the Middle Ages and printing as the technology of the early modern and modern. Yet blank forms reverse this before/after model. Think, for instance, at a blank check. Printing records what is already known: your name and address; the name of the bank; the bank s routing number and your account number. The fact that we fill in or complete blank forms registers the pastness of what has been printed and their manuscript future. The blank spaces are there because we do not know in advance who we will make the check out to, what the sum of money will be, or what the date will be. Manuscript has been transformed into the technology of the future. That future requires that we know how to write, as legibly as possible, the name of a person, company or institution; a date in numbers and, possibly, words; and a sum of money both as a numerical figure and spelled out in words. A completed check also requires one other kind of writing, which can be totally illegible: a signature. A specific feature of the supposedly unique signature is that, unlike the name of the recipient, the date and the sum of money, it should be endlessly reproducible but not necessarily legible. One might even say that the signature has become ever more signature-like to the extent that it is unreadable. The virtual invisibility of blank forms to historians of printing derives from three assumptions that are quite simply wrong. The first is the assumption that printing has only to do with books. But printers do not make books. They print sheets of paper. The chances of the historical survival of a single printed sheet, however, particularly if it is has been cut up to produce multiple forms, are minimal. We have the simple problem that the majority of printed texts, of which books were always a small part, have vanished. My talk will concentrate on the significance of a major type of this ephemeral printing: printed forms to be completed by hand.