Maybe you diligently read an instruction manual from cover to cover before you even turn on a new product. Or perhaps you ‘file’ the information in the kitchen drawer never to be found again – preferring to rely on instinct (and perhaps a degree of stubbornness) in assembling a new piece of furniture. Either way, and even if it’s only months after your purchase, there is almost always a time and a place when instruction manuals come in handy.

While we may think of them as the dense paper booklets that fall out in a tumble of bubblewrap and polystyrene when we are unpacking our new bedside cabinet, instruction manuals are much more. They exist for a multitude of purposes and take many different forms. What’s more, they are not an especially modern invention: they have, in fact, been around for at least two centuries.

“Wherever you are in life, there's always a manual somewhere, hidden behind the scenes,” says Paul Ballard, Managing Director of 3di, a company that specialises in technical writing.

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More than just a practical how-to list, instruction manuals can reveal much about the time and society in which they were written. How they have evolved tells us about how we’ve changed too.