Paper: An Elegy

Just so.

And as such paper logic relentlessly proceeds, so paper itself might be revealed to be the unlikely foundation of the world. In origami, we learn first to make a base, the bird base, or the frog base, and from this base we can build any number of shapes and models, constructing worlds from simple folds and creases. In the same way, paper has been the base, the foundation of all the curious folds and creases of our history: our economy, our art, our wars and our attempts to make peace have all been conducted by means of paper. Elementary.

Yet, as we are forever being reminded, we are now entering a world beyond paper, or certain forms of paper. Everywhere we look, paper is disappearing. We can book and check-in on a flight without any paper changing hands (though we may still need a passport, and a visa, and a list to remind us to pack our passport and our visa, and onboard we may be glad of a paperback, and the sick bag, and the laminated emergency instructions, and the pre-thumbed in-flight magazine, and the wake-up paper face-wipes). We have ticketless parking, and e-books and iPads. And yet at the same time, paper is also proliferating: more and more books are being published; more barista-proffered paper cups dispensed; more and more homes equipped with their very own HP desktop printer. Is This the End of the Book?, the newspaper headlines endlessly ask. Will there be a continuing role for paper?

Short answer: yes.

This book will attempt to show, at much greater length, that reports of the death of paper have been greatly exaggerated. As the richly paper-fed French philosopher Jacques Derrida remarked, ‘To say farewell to paper today would be rather like deciding one fine day to stop speaking because you had learned to write.’ Derrida returns again and again in his work to the question – the questions, rather – of paper. ‘Seeing all these questions emerging on paper, I have the impression … that I have never had any other subject: basically, paper, paper, paper.’

Paper, paper, paper. Anyone old enough to remember floppy disks will remember that paperlessness was once a universal goal among get-ahead office managers. But as Abigail J. Sellen and Richard H.R. Harper explain in their book The Myth of the Paperless Office (2001), it soon became apparent that technological development – and in particular the introduction of email, and network computing – increased rather than decreased office paper consumption. According to Sellen and Harper, technological change has not replaced paper use but rather has shifted ‘the point at which paper is used’: we distribute then print, rather than print and distribute. And anyway, the ultimate goal of all technological development seems to be a paper-like device on which information can not only be accessed, sent and read, but also marked up in a paperlike way. Paper remains the ghost in our machines. We are, simply, paper fanatics and paper fundamentalists: even when it’s not there, when it has been shown to be unnecessary or not to exist, we continue to imagine it, to honour it, and to wish it into being.

The word-processing document I am currently typing onto and into, for example, has – for no good reason at all – the appearance of a sheet of white paper. In the corner of the screen sits an image of a waste-paper basket. There are margins. Paragraphs. The little page-counter at the bottom of the ‘page’ tells me that this is ‘page’ 4 – though how can it be, unless I imagine some vast Platonic paper mill somewhere behind the screen? My ‘wallpaper’ shows a misty mountaintop, like a mural or giant photo pinned to an imaginary wall. The great irony of the end of the age of paper is that the image of paper is everywhere increasing, and continues to determine the shape and scene of our writing and reading. This may be because paper is so useful as a metaphor for language itself – as Saussure notes in his Course in General Linguistics, ‘Language can also be compared with a sheet of paper: thought is the front side and sound the back; one cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time; likewise in language, one can neither divide sound from thought nor thought from sound; the division could be accomplished only abstractedly, and the result would be either pure psychology or pure phonology.’ We can’t seem to abstract or extract paper from our thinking, or our thinking from paper. We change. Words change. But the paper remains the same. It can absorb everything, and be absorbed into everything. Even the most advanced and cherished technologies of our age resemble the page: the iPad is like a jotter; the Kindle like a book; the mobile phone a pocket diary. And the page continues to determine the rhythm of our reading – on my Kindle, page 2 still follows page 1, as sure as night follows day, and the long shadow of paper continues to determine the very colour of my reading. Why black marks on white, on screen, if not because of paper?

It is perhaps because paper is forever disappearing and reappearing in this way – burnt, lost, discarded, disowned, rediscovered, restored, reified – that it remains ancillary to most academic study, so insignificant and inessential as barely to merit discussion outside specialist books, journals and publications. (In Japanese there’s a phrase, yokogami-yaburi, which means to tear paper sideways against its grain – idiomatically, it means ‘perversity’ or ‘pig-headedness’. By ignoring paper, we are perverse; we go against the grain.) Because of its everyday usefulness, paper is an artifact without a popular history. Paper: An Elegy is an attempt to trace and recover some of this history in its many forms.

What this book is not, strictly speaking, is a history of paper. It is, rather, a kind of personally curated Paper Museum, a boutique museum, perhaps, or a musée imaginaire, an imaginary museum, a term borrowed from André Malraux, novelist, art historian and also, somehow, in that extraordinary French way, French Minister of Cultural Affairs from 1959 to 1969. Malraux realised that many of the objects that people now think of as art were not originally regarded as art at all: they were totems or amulets, emanations or images of the gods. ‘In the seventeenth century,’ writes Malraux in The Imaginary Museum of World Sculpture (3 volumes, 1952–54), ‘a Sung painting would not have been compared with a work by Poussin: that would have meant comparing a “strange-looking” landscape with a noble work of art.’ The imaginary museum, according to Malraux, was a ‘song of metamorphosis’, a ‘re-creation of the universe, confronting the Creation’; it was a celebration of all that might be called art, rather than everything that had been art. So, in the Paper Museum, a Dickens manuscript might sit alongside blue sugar paper and brown paper packages tied up with string, forming a kind of vast paper mirror in which we might view ourselves and our world – colossal, dreadful and amazing.

Any history of paper, it should further be said, for the purpose of clarification – and in particular this history of paper, which is not a history of paper – is not the same thing as a history of the book, nor indeed the same thing as a history of writing. There are plenty of such histories already. There was of course writing before paper, on birch bark, clay tablets, ivory, wood and bone, papyrus, palm leaves and silk. And there is writing after paper. There were also books before paper, on papyrus and parchment; and there are books after paper. Paper: An Elegy is not really about books, though books are undoubtedly one of the most ubiquitous of paper products. Nor is it a book about paper-making, in itself a vast and fascinating subject. Paper: An Elegy is, rather, an attempt to show how and why humans became attached to paper and became engrafted and sutured onto and into it, so that our very being might be described as papery.

Because everything that matters to us happens on paper. Without paper, we are nothing. We are born, and issued with a birth certificate. We collect more of these certificates at school, and yet another when we marry, and another when we divorce, and buy a house, and when we die. We are born human, but are forever becoming paper, as paper becomes us, our artificial skin. Everything we are is paper: it is the ground of activity, the partner to all our enterprises, the key to our understanding of the past. How do we know the past? Only through paper and all it records – and through architecture, of course, though architecture, as we shall see, rather depends on paper. So. Paper wraps stone.

Paper: An Elegy will address and acknowledge the great pathos of paper, and our nostalgia for its past: the thickness and weight of old writing paper; the tattered posters of our idealistic youth; the increasing vulnerability and scarcity of all those scraps of paper that represent our personal and collective history. But above all it will be concerned with the paradoxes of paper, the ironies of its uses, its multiple meanings, its values, and its extraordinary scope and scale. The fact that a piece of paper may be a priceless artifact – a painting or a manuscript – or a piece of litter. The simple fact that it may bring glad tidings, or spread bad news: a love letter, and a suicide note. That it is both adequate to communication, and inadequate to thought: antecedent to thought, and a posteriori. A form of external memory, and the means by which we forget. Lacking in substance, yet full of value. Material and simulacrum. Vulnerable and durable. (Tales of lost manuscripts are legion: Carlyle’s famous manuscript of the first volume of his The French Revolution, used by a maid to light the fire; Thomas De Quincey losing his notes for Confessions of an English Opium-Eater when ‘The spark of a candle [fell] unobserved amongst a very large pile of papers in a bedroom’; Tennyson losing the manuscript of his Poems, Chiefly Lyrical from his gaping great-coat pocket.) Delicate yet sharp, and capable of inflicting cuts. Ephemeral yet everlasting. (Byron in Don Juan: ‘To what straits old Time reduces/Frail man, when paper, even a rag like this,/Survives himself, his tomb, and all that’s his.’) Everything and nothing: the ultimate MacGuffin. An object that somehow magically grants us access to ourselves, that leads us from the surface into imaginary worlds, and deep within, a threshold to what Henri Bergson called ‘the uninterrupted humming of life’s depths’.

And the greatest irony of all? Paper’s most powerful magic? Simply this. That paper allows us to be present – or to appear to be present – when we are in fact absent. It both breaks and bridges time and distance. I am talking to you now, for example, on paper. You cannot see me, and you cannot hear me. I may, for all you know, already be dead. But by the mysterious application of pen to paper, and by your patient reading, we have between us conjured the illusion of communication: a voice on the page, and my disappearance into that voice on the page. Paper provides for my self-invention, my self-disclosure, and my self-erasure. Total visibility. Perfect camouflage. In William Golding’s novel Free Fall (1959) the narrator addresses the reader: ‘I tick. I exist. I am poised eighteen inches over the black rivets you are reading, I am in your place, I am shut in a bone box and trying to fasten myself on the white paper. The rivets join us together and yet for all the passion we share nothing but our sense of division.’ Here I am. There I go.

Paper: An Elegy is intended in part as a technological and material history, but more importantly as a symbolic history, or a history of symbols, of how paper becomes sacred, and sacralised and fetishised, how it promises and provides us with freedoms, and imposes upon us clear boundaries. There is, alas, much paper that will be missing from the book: no decoupage; no exam papers; no musical scores; no Top Trumps. Online, such limits do not apply: we can just click through. (And let me mention here some words, phrases and ideas that might send you scurrying to Google – papier poudré, papillotes, papeterie, paper-ministers, paper-skulls, paperage, papercrete and papercreters, the infinite history of litter.) There are so many types and kinds of paper that I have had to leave unfingered and untouched. Among Japanese papers alone, there are, or were, hundreds of unexplored treasures: hiki-awase, once used as the inner lining of a warrior’s breastplate; hosokawa-shi, used for government land records; shibugami, the persimmon-juice-impregnated paper used for the sacks in which grains and cereals were stored; the rickshaw driver’s padded paper coats; the paper used to wrap medicines; the paper used to wrap a kimono. The sounds of different papers. The smells of different papers; the smell of ammonia used in large office print machines. The collection is not complete. But it has begun.

We have lived in a world of paper, and we are paper people. In Salvador Plascencia’s novel The People of Paper (2005) – a masterpiece of paper, on paper – a monk named Antonio becomes ‘the first origami surgeon’. His skills are extraordinary, but he is, inevitably, excommunicated, outcast and unemployed, until one day he retreats, alone, to a factory with a wheelbarrow filled with cardboard and napkins and books:

Antonio split the spines of books, spilling leaves of Austen and Cervantes, sheets from Leviticus and Judges, all mixing with the pages of The Book of Incandescent Light. Then Antonio unrolled the wrapping paper and construction paper and began to cut at the cardboard and then fold.

She was the first to be created: cardboard legs, cellophane appendix, and paper breasts. Created not from the rib of a man but from paper scraps.

This magnificent creature rises from Antonio’s cutting table, steps over her exhausted, dying creator, and strides out into the world.

Let us take her hand now and enter the Paper Museum.

A Note on the Paper Used in the Writing of this Book

All my books have really been counterproofs, or offsets, re-marques, like cartoons, those drawings made to the same scale as the grand painting or fresco but which are in fact only preparatory, and which are applied to the wall, and pricked through or indented: a mere outline or image of some greater design.

This book I like to think of not as a cartoon but as like John F. Peto’s ‘Old Scraps’ (1894), a miniature trompe l’oeil. Or a trompe l’esprit.

‘I am typing this book on yellow paper,’ announces the narrator of Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper (1936). ‘It is very yellow paper, and it is this very yellow paper because often sometimes I am typing it in my room at my office, and the paper I use for Sir Phoebus’s letters is blue paper with his name across the corner.’ The yellow paper helps distinguish the novel from the work.

Alas, I have adopted no such sensible system.

I have typed on a laptop, and on a desktop. I have read many books: paper books, Kindle books, Google books. I have read articles online, in print journals, and in magazines. I have made copies; I have pressed ‘Print’. I have written notes in margins, and I have written notes, by hand, in notebooks, and on A4 narrow-feint paper. I have organised my notes into folders. I have disorganised my notes in the folders. I have typed sentences, then paragraphs, then chapters. I have printed out these chapters, marked up revisions and corrections in pencil, and then incorporated these changes, and printed out the chapters again. And again. And again. And again. And then finally, I sent the ‘document’ by email to my editor, who suggested further changes. Some of which I ignored. Most of which I ignored. But some of which I incorporated. And all of which required yet more printing, and marking up and correcting, before sending it all off again. And then again. Proofs. More corrections. More proofs. Interminable? Inexplicable.

In total, this book is made from twenty reams of plain white 80 gsm copier paper, fifteen A4 lined, narrow-feint pads, four Moleskine pocket notebooks, six packs of A5 lined index cards, fifty manila folders (green), and three wrist-thick blocks of Post-it notes (assorted colours). I’m sure there are easier ways of writing books.

Too much? Too much. Not enough.

(#ulink_3da70c63-577b-5313-8c95-bac2bfe28bc0)

Japanese tissue paper with fine swirls of fibre

Making Japanese paper:

1 Stripping the bark

2 Soaking the bark in water

3 Beating the fibres to a pulp

4 Placing the paper mould into the vat of pulp

5 Drying and polishing the resulting sheet of paper

You are living, let us say, in Japan, two thousand years ago. You and your family have planted some trees – mulberry trees. The trees grow. You remove some of the branches of the trees and steam them in order to loosen the inner bark. You peel and dry and soak and scrape and rinse the bark. You find this pleasing: it turns the bark whiter and lighter. The fibres of the bark begin to separate. You boil the bark to soften it further, and then you bleach it in the sun. And then you beat it, and you beat it, and you beat it with a wooden beater and then you throw lumps of this bleached bark pulp into a vat filled with water. And then you mix it and beat it again. And again. You now have a vat of grey mush. You take a wooden frame with a sieve-like screen, dip it into the mush, scoop up the frame, tossing off the excess water, and rock it back and forth until you have a nice, smooth, consistent sheet of mush on your sieve. You allow all the water to drain off. Now you have a sort of damp mat of macerated fibre stuck to your sieve. You remove this mat from the sieve, and place it on a wooden board to dry. It dries, and you smooth it and polish it, maybe with some animal fat or maybe just with a stone, anything you can get your hands on to make it shiny and smooth. And then you trim the edges and admire your handiwork. Congratulations. You have produced a sheet of paper.

Basically, paper has continued to be made by this method throughout the world to this very day, and seems likely to continue to be made by the same method tomorrow. Compare the ancient Japanese technique to John Evelyn’s description of hand paper-making in seventeenth-century England, for example, from his diary, dated 24 August 1678:

I went to see my Lord of St. Alban’s house, at Byfleet, an old large building. Thence, to the paper-mills, where I found them making a coarse white paper. They cull the rags which are linen for white paper, woollen for brown; then they stamp them in troughs to a pap, with pestles, or hammers, like the powder-mills, then put it into a vessel of water, in which they dip a frame closely wired with wire as small as a hair and as close as a weaver’s reed; on this they take up the pap, the superfluous water draining through the wire; this they dexterously turning, shake out like a pancake on a smooth board between two pieces of flannel, then press it between a great press, the flannel sucking out the moisture; then, taking it out, they ply and dry it on strings, as they dry linen in the laundry; then dip it in alum-water, lastly, polish and make it up in quires. They put some gum in the water in which they macerate the rags. The mark we find on the sheets is formed in the wire.

The details may differ, but the processes remain essentially the same (as indeed did Evelyn’s famous note-taking habit, established at the age of just eleven, and which sustained him over seventy years, through Oxford, a Grand Tour, the English Civil War, Cromwell’s Protectorate, the Restoration, and work on dozens of books and treatises).

Industrial methods have now largely replaced hand-beating and dipping and drying, with mechanical agitators to beat pulp, and high-pressure jets and conveyor belts to spray it and spread it, and vacuums and cylinders and presses to dry it, and rollers to polish it, but there are still really only three stages in the whole paper-production process: the preparing of the pulp; the forming of the paper on a mould or a mesh; and the drying and finishing. In a modern paper plant, these stages translate into a process that goes something like this. Bales of wood pulp are fed into a hydrapulper, in which the pulp is diluted with water and mixed – think of a hydrapulper as a giant Moulinex, and the pulp as paper-gruel. The porridge-like substance produced – the ‘stock’ or ‘stuff’ – can then be further diluted and undergo further beating, or fibrillation, to cut and break up the fibres of the pulp, and screened to remove impurities, and blended with various additives. Then, and only then, is the stuff ready for the papermaking machine proper. A typical modern machine is mind-bogglingly huge: hundreds of metres long, costing millions, running twenty-four hours a day and capable of producing hundreds of thousands of tonnes of paper every year. The slurry, or stock – which looks like milk at this stage, or at least a kind of thin white water – passes through a ‘flow box’ or ‘head box’, where it is sprayed onto a mesh conveyor belt. As the stock is sprayed, the water drains through the mesh, leaving behind a fibrous mat, just as in the early Japanese hand moulds, only on a massive scale, and at astonishing speed. The stuff then passes through heavy rollers, with more moisture being squeezed and sucked out, and beneath a dandy roll, and through steam-heated drying cylinders and a size press, where sizing is added – the starch that reduces absorbency – and then over the calender, the big iron rollers which polish and glaze the surface of the paper, and finally it passes onto large reels, ready to be cut into sheets or split into smaller reels and packed for despatch to paper merchants and converters who will produce and package the paper ready for you to print out your essential emails and flight boarding details.

Papermaking: the same yesterday, today and tomorrow

A diagram of a papermaking machine

It is an amazing sight to see a modern paper machine in full flow, even now in the twenty-first century: in the nineteenth century it was nothing less than astonishing. Herman Melville, that great nineteenth-century chronicler of astonishment, describes a paper mill in his story ‘The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids’ (1855), in which the narrator visits a mill which is oddly but reassuringly very like a whale, a ‘large whitewashed factory’, ‘like an arrested avalanche’. This vast white beast, which swallows up rags and water and people, is located ‘not far from Woedolor Mountain in New England … By the country people … called the Devil’s Dungeon’. The narrator of the story is a businessman, ‘Having embarked on a large scale in the seedsman’s business’, who is seeking a cheap wholesale source for seed packets. Inside the factory he stands, amazed:

Something of awe now stole over me, as I gazed upon this inflexible iron animal. Always, more or less, machinery of this ponderous, elaborate sort strikes, in some moods, strange dread into the human heart, as some living, panting Behemoth might. But what made the thing I saw so specially terrible to me was the metallic necessity, the unbudging fatality which governed it. Though, here and there, I could not follow the thin, gauzy veil of pulp in the course of its more mysterious or entirely invisible advance, yet it was indubitable that, at those points where it eluded me, it still marched on in unvarying docility to the autocratic cunning of the machine. A fascination fastened on me. I stood spellbound and wandering in my soul. Before my eyes – there, passing in slow procession along the wheeling cylinders, I seemed to see, glued to the pallid incipience of the pulp, the yet more pallid faces of all the pallid girls I had eyed that heavy day. Slowly, mournfully, beseechingly, yet unresistingly, they gleamed along, their agony dimly outlined on the imperfect paper, like the print of the tormented face on the handkerchief of Saint Veronica.

Who could possibly have conceived of such a monster, such a panting Behemoth? A man called Louis-Nicolas Robert could. Like Melville, Robert too saw the pallid faces of the workers in the pallid incipience of the pulp, though where Melville saw agony and torment, Robert saw freedom and liberation. In its very incarnation, by its very originators, the papermaking machine was seen as a metallic necessity, a triumph of technology over man.

Louis-Nicolas Robert, born in Paris in 1761 and nicknamed ‘the Philosopher’ at school, became a soldier in the French army, in the First Battalion of the Grenoble Artillery. Restless and dissatisfied, and with no prospect of promotion, he eventually found himself back in Paris in the very midst of the French Revolution, working as ‘an inspector of personnel’, a classic petit cadre, in a paper mill at Essonnes, to the south of Paris, where he was appalled by the behaviour of the workers, who had become infected with the ideas of the times. Encouraged by his employer, François Didot, Robert began experimenting with plans for a machine that could replace the troublesome papermakers. After much trial and error just such a machine was devised, and on 18 January 1799 Robert was granted a patent for a papermaking machine to make ‘sheets of an extraordinary length without the help of any worker’. Ironically, Robert and Didot then began wrangling between themselves, arguing about money and the patent, but since neither man could afford to make a success of the enterprise alone, Didot called upon his brother-in-law John Gamble, an Englishman, who took drawings and samples of the machine-made paper to London in 1801, hoping to find investors. Gamble got lucky: he managed to persuade a famous, wealthy family of London stationers, the Fourdriniers, to back him, and together they were soon granted an English patent for an ‘Invention for Making Paper’ (‘in single sheets, without seam or joining, from one to twelve feet and upwards wide and from one to forty feet and upwards in length’). The industrial history of papermaking had begun.

Robert’s machine was brought from France in 1802, and the Fourdriniers employed a young man called Bryan Donkin to modify and improve it. Like Robert a genius in the pay of the boss class, Donkin became a kind of consultant inventor who worked out of a factory set up for him by the Fourdriniers in Bermondsey, where he established the first British cannery, was responsible for developing split steel nibs for pens, designed and improved metalworking tools such as lathes and drills, and ended up advising Marc Isambard Brunel in his work on the Thames Tunnel. But the paper machine was his first big break. He set about making a series of improvements to Robert’s prototype, removing the vat from below the wire and eventually replacing the hand-operated crankshaft with a mechanical drive. The first improved Fourdrinier machine was set up at Frogmore Mill in Hertfordshire in 1803, and remains the effective template for all modern paper machines: a moving belt made of wire mesh has stock poured onto it, water drains through the mesh, leaving a fibrous sheet, which is cut into sections and hung out to dry, as indeed were the Fourdriniers, who had poured money into the enterprise and found themselves bankrupt by 1810, having made a net loss on the machine of over £50,000, though years later Parliament granted them some small compensation for ‘being reduced to comparative poverty in the evening of a long life spent in the execution of a great national object’.

The great national object did not meet, however, with universal acclaim. As it was for the mighty Fourdriniers, so it was for the lowly workers, only more so: the machines stole not their capital but their livelihoods. More and better machines meant that fewer and less-skilled people needed to be employed. The machine became an enemy. During the Swing riots that spread throughout England in 1830 a number of paper mills were attacked – in Norfolk, Wiltshire, Worcestershire and Buckinghamshire. Most of those involved seem to have been members of the Original Society of Papermakers, who were furious and fearful for their futures. But, alas, the riots solved nothing. Several paper manufacturers went out of business, and those workers who were tried and found guilty were transported to Tasmania. The march of the machines continued.

Progress was relentless. The cylinder machine – using a revolving brass cylinder that was part submerged in the pulp vat – had been patented by another Englishman, John Dickinson, in 1809, and on 29 November 1814 The Times became the first newspaper printed on such a machine. In 1820 Thomas Bonsor Crompton was granted a patent for drying cylinders, which meant paper no longer had to be hung to dry. In 1824 John Dickinson was granted another patent – he was, with Bryan Donkin, one of the great paper pioneers – this time for a machine that pasted paper together to form a kind of cardboard. In 1825 the first ‘dandy roll’ was developed, so-called because on seeing it in action workers at the mills apparently exclaimed ‘What a dandy!’ It was used to press watermarks into machine-made paper. A Fourdrinier machine – built by Donkin in England – was set up in America in 1827. In 1830 bleach was introduced into the process of turning rags into paper. In 1840 Friedrich Gottlob Keller, a weaver and reed-binder in Saxony, patented a wood-grinding machine, making mass paper production possible. Christmas cards, photographs, adhesive postage stamps and paper bags all began to be produced during the 1840s and 1850s, and by 1900 there were machine-made cigarette papers, tracing papers, cups, plates, collars, cuffs, napkins, tissues and almost every other imaginable paper product. With the first commercial production of corrugated cardboard boxes around the turn of the century – making it possible for paper safely to send itself to itself by itself – the Age of Paper had reached its zenith.

Watermarks: the equivalent of an artisan’s trade-mark