This chapter reveals Sterne theorising his own experimentation with the visual appearance of the novel through images of the hand and handwriting. It measures the extent of Sterne’s innovation with the typographic manicule and his representation of script in print, comparing his innovations with those of Samuel Richardson a decade earlier while identifying the first known instance of printed strikethrough. Sterne inscribed his work with innovative examples of real and fictional handwriting, signing each copy of his novel and commissioning an original woodcut device to create the strikethrough. The chapter explores Sterne’s use of existing print practices or processes of book production in unusual and surprising ways. It establishes Sterne’s position in the print shop and his desire for his works to have specific material attributes, identifying also his anxiety over the potential invasion of his copyright. In revealing the author’s attempts to control every aspect of book production and his engagement with copyright debates, this chapter positions Sterne as a book designer well versed in codices from multiple disciplines and their varied modes of presenting printed data.

The final chapter considers Sterne’s use of engraved lines as illustrations of digression. Contextualising the print history of lines, the chapter examines the history of the dance manual, which, like that of Tristram Shandy, is one of innovation. Dance manuals were visual texts that had to be ever more experimental in their attempt to instruct by means of the printed page. Tristram Shandy shares with Beauchamp-Feuillet manuals diagrams which become demystified through labelling: the four plotlines closing volume 6 and Trim’s flourish in volume 9. Sterne defers annotating these lines to encourage the reader to encounter the digressive text in a looping and non-linear manner. Trim’s flourish is remarkably like the symbols which in the Beauchamp-Feuillet dance notation system represent arm movements or dance steps, and the serpentine, Hogarthian progress of a dance like the minuet, one of the most popular dances of the mid-eighteenth century. Like Sterne’s use of dance in Tristram Shandy, Trim’s flourish, when read alongside eighteenth-century dance notation, signifies both the one-off movement of his stick and the inability of anyone in Sterne’s novel to progress in a straight line.

Is it appropriate to include a chapter on editing Brahms’s music in a book about Brahms in Context? In fact, it is not only appropriate but indispensable because it concerns what Brahms left for the present day: his notated music. Furthermore, from the first compositional idea through to publication, his works existed in the ‘context’ of his contemporaries: friends, acquaintances, copyists, publishers, proofreaders, performers, concert organisers, musicians and critics. Finally, the ‘context’ should not be limited to his contemporaries because we also need to investigate how his now ‘historic’ scores were edited after his death and continue to be edited today in the light of philological and editorial premises and methods. Naturally, the question of ‘suitable’ editing arises, and this must reflect knowledge of current Brahms philology.

The reception of Brahms’s music beyond his home city of Hamburg began in 1853, when the young composer made his first extended journey and presented his compositions to some of the leading figures of German contemporary music: Robert Schumann, Robert Franz and Franz Liszt. Each reacted to these unpublished works in distinctive ways.

Robert Schumann, with whom Brahms spent the whole month of October in Düsseldorf,was instantly enthralled.