HOW often have you heard people use the word “manuscript” to describe text written on a computer?

Now the National Library of Australia is about to put an end to any such loose usage with an exhibition that puts the work of the human hand under the spotlight.

According to the curator, Nat Williams, “Handwritten: ten centuries of manuscript treasures from Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin” starts in the mid-800s with a fragment from the “Aeneid” and finishes in 1984 and includes the handwriting of figures as different as Kepler, Galileo, Beethoven and Napoleon.

Williams declares himself overwhelmed by the generosity of the Berlin State Library and its curator Dr Gabriele Kaiser, who mounted a similar exhibition in 2008 to mark the centenary of the gift of manuscripts by chemist and collector Ludwig Darmstaedter, whose initial interest in the writing of scientists turned into a collection of “great names”.

If he was looking for an Einstein manuscript but came across one by Michelangelo, he’d buy it. At last serious count, there were 250,000 items in the collection which, even after Darmstaedter’s death in 1927, continued to “grow and grow and grow”.

All too well aware that “this is an exhibition about thought”, Williams and his staff have broadened its scope, which will now open with medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts. The library in Berlin has allowed them a five-year monopoly on the page openings to be displayed.

While the designers will use graphic devices to entice the eye, you’ll need to read – as Williams says: “You have to let a piece of sheet of paper stand for a life.” Dickens dashes off his signature in a hurry, Newton writes in a fastidiously neat hand.

With 13,500 visitors already pouring in to the new Treasures Gallery at the NLA and the example of “National Treasures from the World’s Great Libraries” in 2001-02, Williams knows this must be a crowd-pleaser.

So the show will finish with a selection of musical manuscripts, including scores of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro”.

“It’s pretty remarkable,” Williams says. The German library has asked for no fees, so it’s free to the public – “it’s a gift to the people of Australia”.

“Handwritten”, exclusive to the National Library of Australia, November 26 to March 18. Free entry.