In The Guardian this week, Stuart Jeffries asks whether writing by hand will become a lost art, as technology increasingly enables us to communicate without it.

He passes on a bit of history along the way. For example, the Sumarian merchants invented a script 5000 years ago, using “a stylus and wet clay to record the ingredients for beer.” Notes Jeffries, “The endlessly inventive outpouring of human writing thus grew out of commercial necessity.”

Perhaps that observation holds the secret to whether handwriting will die. Does it have, today, any commercial necessity?