Word: manuscript
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...Marcel Proust spent the greater part of his waking time ransacking his memory and writing down what he found with mingled love and horror. When he died in 1922, he left a mountain of legends about himself-of the fabulous invalid who nearly always wrote in bed, with his manuscript propped on his knees; of the Paris room whose walls were lined with cork to deaden all sound of the world outside. Besides his monumental Remembrance of Things...
Charlemagne, who thirsted for culture as much as for conquest,* left his personal stamp on the manuscript art. He used to complain that the prevailing script was too knotty to read; to rectify it the Emperor invited the Northumbrian monk Alcuin to teach the Franks a comparatively simple hand inherited from the days of Roman rule. The script did not stay simple: by the 13th Century, manuscript texts had become as tangled as briar patches. The gnarled letters of ladies' prayer books were twined about with ornamental thorns, and even the page borders swarmed with children and gargoyles...
With printing and the late Renaissance, manuscript-making entered its long decline. The last book in the show was a 17th Century Calligraphic Specimen, a prayer bedecked with gay flourishes and signed by one Friar Didace of Paris, self-described as "a poor little Capuchin, very unworthy...
...eventually buried, at Aachen, sitting up with a manuscript, the Coronation Book, across his knees...
When the Atlantic Monthly held its first prize novel contest 23 years ago, a flood of 1,150 manuscripts engulfed the editorial staff; extra readers were hired to weed out the hopeless entries. Into the rejects went a manuscript titled Jalna, written by a Canadian woman named Mazo de la Roche. Its handsome binding caught the eye of one of the Atlantic's regular editors. He picked the manuscript out of the discard, glanced at it and did not stop reading until he had finished it. Jalna won the contest's $10,000 first prize...