Paper: Paging Through History
By Mark Kurlansky, W. W. Norton & Company, 416 pages, $28
Paper holds the WORLD together. It wipes our foreheads, cleans up our spills, bags our groceries and disposes of our waste products. It floods into our mailboxes at home and across our desks at work. And it’s not going away anytime soon. From the late 1970s, futurologists predicted that we would soon work in paperless offices. Though paper use in offices is decreasing, the average American in white or pink collar still generates about a kilogram of paper and paper products a day. That in turn is only part of the more than 300 kilograms of paper that the average American uses in a year.
A sheet of paper can be a work of art, its surface rich with life and visual interest. Timothy Barrett, the MacArthur fellow and master paper maker, moved to Japan to learn how to make washi: a translucent paper so delicate it hardly seems material. In more recent years, he has studied the solid white paper, made from cloth rags, that Europeans used for books from the 14th century on. These papers, he says, “had a kind of crackle and made you want to touch them.” Now he makes them as well, from the proper ingredients, raw flax and hemp.
Paper can be scary. For centuries, empty white pages tormented unproductive writers, as motionless cursors do now. In the 19th century, newspapers appeared several times a day, posters covered exterior walls and pillars, and shopkeepers wrapped everything from fish to books in paper. Improved methods of manufacture yielded paper cheap and plentiful enough to serve all these needs. But the new supply came at a high human cost. Herman Melville unforgettably described one of the new paper mills that fed the cities’ appetites: “At rows of blank-looking counters sat rows of blank-looking girls, with blank, white folders in their blank hands, all blankly folding blank paper ... The air swam with the fine, poisonous particles, which from all sides darted, subtilely, as motes in sunbeams, into the lungs.”
Mark Kurlansky has written wide-ranging histories of cod and salt. Now he has turned to another apparently insignificant, indispensable subject. More than 2,000 years ago, the Chinese realised that plant fibres, now known as cellulose, could be beaten, mixed with water and then left on a screen to drain until a sheet — a sheet of paper — remains. This modest, practical insight changed the world. Millenniums before anyone knew what cellulose was, paper makers separated it strand by strand from wood and silk, cotton and seaweed, and devised a writing material that is still cheaper and more adaptable than any other.
The history of paper is a history of cultural transmission, and Kurlansky tells it vividly in this compact, well-illustrated book. He follows paper across borders and oceans — to Japan and Korea, on the one hand, and into Central Asia and what would become the Islamic world on the other — and watches it change. In Andalusia, Roman mills with enormous grindstones, originally used for making olive oil, ground the cellulose exceedingly fine, helping to make thin, smooth paper. In Fabriano in the Italian Marche, wire moulds produced paper with handsome surface patterns and distinctive watermarks.
Paper mills were not good neighbours. They were noisy, they processed vast piles of dirty rags, collected by ragpickers, and they stank of ammonia, often derived from human urine, which was used to break down the rags’ fibres. Nonetheless, paper was needed, and mills spread. Inexpensive paper made possible the creation of enormous libraries, which in turn underpinned the intellectual flowering of the Muslim Middle Ages and the rise of printing in both Asia and Europe.
Experimentation never stopped. The 18th century saw the creation of wove paper: a smooth paper, without the ribbed pattern created by traditional wire moulds, which artists such as Turner used to create dramatic new effects. In the 19th century, the steam engine turned paper mills into factories that made paper from wood pulp. Even in the digital age, Kurlansky shows, paper finds new uses — artists are working creatively with it as never before — and serves old ones: if print newspapers are in decline, print books look pretty healthy, especially as new technologies produce them more quickly and cheaply than ever.
To put the history of paper in context means knowing its rivals, the other traditional writing materials and the cultures that used them. Kurlansky briskly surveys everything from Chinese oracle bones, cuneiform tablets and Egyptian papyrus to Mexican amate — the bark-based writing material, not a true paper, on which the Aztecs wrote their glyphs, though they may also have made real paper from agave. He has a sharp eye for curious details, such as the information on the rituals and diets of rambunctious 18th-century French paper workers collected by the historian Leonard Rosenband.
Kurlansky loves explaining technologies, but he is no 1990s-style techno-determinist. In fact, he cautions more than once against believing in the “technological fallacy”. Human needs and abilities determine the success and the failure of new technologies. Paper and printing conquered Europe because European society became so curious, so hungry for new information that scribes could no longer produce enough books to satisfy it. Similarly, human tastes will probably prevent the computer from creating a world without paper.
“Paper” moves at a fast tempo, like one of those legendary tours of Europe that announce, “If this is Tuesday, we must be in Belgium,” and like them it’s most useful as a broad survey. Kurlansky’s historical judgments are often trite and not seldom wrong. He tells us that Europe was by 1500 “the most advanced civilisation in the world”, a traditional view contradicted by a mass of recent scholarship on Asia. His grasp of details is shaky. The writer of a history of paper should not refer to “handwritten manuscripts”: the word “manuscript” means a text written by hand. He should also know something about such texts. Kurlansky describes medieval manuscripts as large and unwieldy. But Petrarch — whom he summons as a witness — carried his little, portable handwritten copy of St Augustine’s “Confessions” all the way to the top of Mont Ventoux.
Though Kurlansky mentions the oral traditions that persisted in the age of print, he misses something much bigger: the vast expansion of writing that took place at the same time. Even as printers filled the world with books, governments invested in vast new paper-management systems, impresarios produced handwritten newsletters for select clients and scholars devoted their lives to filling notebooks with excerpts taken from the vast production of the presses and systematically classified under hundreds of topical headings. The age of Gutenberg was also the age of the “paper king”, Philip II of Spain, who took to signing documents with a stamp and waved them around at audiences like a Renaissance Joe McCarthy. Seen in this light, the expansion in paper use that followed the introduction of the PC looks less strange.
The German journalist Lothar Muller, whose “White Magic” was published in English two years ago, does a better job of conveying these paradoxes in paper’s story. He also evokes the varied ways in which writers and readers have responded to its strangely provocative white surface. Kurlansky offers a versatile introduction to this long and complicated history. But a true historian of paper needs to understand that every page has another side.
–New York Times News Service
Anthony Grafton teaches European history at Princeton.
