Writing in itself is the most extraordinary technology. It separates the message from the messenger, and makes the word an object.
-Professor Simon Franklin
Cultural historians are hardly strangers to niche interests, but it’s difficult, at first glance, to understand why anyone would want to study the history of printed blank forms. Nevertheless, part of Professor Simon Franklin’s recent research has focused on just that – or more specifically, on printed blank forms in Russia, up to the mid-19th century. So comprehensive has his investigation been that Russia now has its own early chronology of printed blank forms.
‘Why?’ seems an obvious question. “The printed blank form is one of the great innovations of civilisation,” Franklin asserted. “It’s interactive – a fixed template, with variable components. Spreading in Western Europe from the late 15th century, in Russia from a couple of hundred years later, they became essential in administration and commerce. They are the direct precursors of most kinds of online transaction today.”
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Image: Entry pass to the Moscow English Club, St Petersburg, 1829
Credit: Simon Franklin
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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