Double Fold

by Nicholson Baker

  It was all rag paper then, remember. Mill women sorted4 towering mounds and bales of linen and cotton castoffs, cutting the cloth by hand into four-inch squares5 or sending it through a cutting machine6 invented by Moses Beach of the Sun. (Moses’s son Alfred Beach, incidentally, edited Scientific American and invented the subway tunnel-boring machine.) The rags went into a tumbling drum, to rid them of dirt and buttons (rubber was almost impossible to remove completely, and left black specks7 in the paper), and they were boiled in chemicals to soften the cloth, and then they went into a rotary engine called—because it was invented by the Dutch—a Hollander. The Hollander, an oval trough with a metal-edged paddle wheel in it, tore and mashed the broth of half-digested rags until their cellulose fibers won independence, and this pulp, poured out onto a wire-mesh (or “web”) conveyor belt and squeezed through rollers, dried into paper—book paper and newsprint.

  By the eighteen-fifties, the United States published more newspapers than any other country; U.S. paper consumption was equal to England’s and France’s combined.8 Rag imports9 flowed in from twenty countries, but most came from Italy—twelve million pounds of Italian rags in 1852 and, by 1854, twenty-four million pounds. But there were ominous developments: part of the crop of Tuscan rags, which had formerly gone in its entirety to the United States, went to England instead. “Complaints of the price and scarcity10 of paper were universal,” according to Joel Munsell’s nineteenth-century Chronology of the Origin and Progress of Paper and Paper-Making. Both the Tribune and the Sun reduced their size that year to save on paper costs, and the Philadelphia Daily Evening Register discontinued publication “on account of the high price11 of paper.”

  Writing in 1854, Dr. Deck envisioned a “famine of paper material looming up in the distance.” And where there is famine, there is money to be made. On a trip to Jamaica, prospecting for copper, Deck had taken time to evaluate several possible rag substitutes—aloe, plantain, banana, and dagger-grass—but none was satisfactory. Several generations of papermakers12 before him had experimented with alternative “furnishes” for their product. Bamboo waste, old rope, corncobs, grass, and straw were important American pulp additives; European research had roamed farther afield. Jacob Christian Schäffer, an authority on the fungi of Bavaria, had attempted, in a series of works in the seventeen-seventies, to make paper from potatoes (both the skins and the insides), dandelion roots, cabbage stumps, thistles, grapevines, lilies of the valley, and Bavarian peat—but none of his papierstoffen found favor in commercial mills. An Englishman named Hill produced, in 1854, a paper made from horseradish;13 also one from manure, “bleached and reduced to pulp by the usual modes.”

  Pulpwood chips or sawdust had held promise ever since 1719, when René de Réaumur, a scholar of insects, observed to the Academie Royale that certain American wasps make excellent paper from trees—they “seem to invite us14 to try.” But only in Asia did arboreal paper have a long tradition: the Japanese used the beaten inner bark of the mulberry to produce a medium of enviable durability. A few wood-pulp practitioners claimed success in America: the October 28, 1830, issue of the Crawford Messenger, published in Meadville, Pennsylvania, was reportedly printed on paper made from lime and aspen wood. When Dard Hunter, the eminent twentieth-century paper historian, wrote his Papermaking, there was a set of bound volumes of the Crawford Messenger at the library of Allegheny College in Meadville. A librarian there wrote Hunter that the issue of the Messenger for that day looked and felt smoother than the others in the volume: “All the other edges are frayed, stained, or creased while this one is clear cut as if it had been shaped with shears.” Hunter proposed taking a sample of the paper to test whether it had wood pulp, but his request was refused: “The librarians,” Hunter wrote, “are reluctant to spare even a fragment15 of the paper for this purpose.”

  When I called the Allegheny College library to ask after the October 28, 1830, issue of the Crawford Messenger, I was told that it was gone. There is a run of the Messenger on microfilm, but a shrunken picture of a page can’t reveal much about the composition of its paper. And the particular set of the newspaper that the microfilmers laid out under the camera had lacked certain issues, including the one for October 28, 1830—the Ace comb problem again. Are there any originals left? The Library of Congress owns one original volume of the Messenger, for 1828—they kept a lot of newspapers printed before 1870. (Several years ago, however, they did give away, to the American Antiquarian Society, a number of runs from states with letters that come early in the alphabet; they planned to give away more, but there were protests, and the project was dropped.) And the American Antiquarian Society itself holds a few scattered issues, but not the one supposedly made of lime and aspen. There is, however, at least one remaining set, at the Crawford County Historical Society. Rose Deka, a librarian there, told me that the October 28, 1830, issue is still in “excellent condition.” Thanks to libraries like hers, which keep what they own, the physical history and durability of early wood-pulp paper is still a subject that can be studied, just barely.

  But circa 1847, when Dr. Deck made a trip to Egypt in search of Cleopatra’s lost emerald mines, wood-pulp paper was by no means a sure thing. Deck enjoyed digging things up—he fancied himself something of an archaeologist as well as a prospector. (He had written about some Anglo-Saxon relics for the Archeological Review.) His father had known Giovanni Belzoni, the famous Egyptian-tomb plunderer, and thus Deck had inherited a few interesting items, including a piece of mummy linen of a “remarkably delicate texture.” Though the expedition to Egypt was a failure—no emerald mines turned up—the explorers did encounter some major “mummy pits,” as Deck called them. Where the winds had scoured the plains of sand, Deck reported that he had seen “fragments and limbs exposed in such plenty and variety that the wanderer would be impressed with the idea that he was in the studio of a Frankenstein, in an extensive line of business.”

  He made some calculations. Assume two thousand years of widespread embalming, an average life span of thirty-three years, and a stable Nilotic population of eight million people. That left you with five hundred million mummies, just “rotting in the ground.” The numbers were “incredible.” What to do with that many mummies? How might an enlightened Western visitor best put them to use?

  We could set them on fire, of course. In H. Rider Haggard’s novel She, mummies are used as torches—the bituminous preservatives burn so fiercely that “flames would literally spout16 out of the ears and mouth in tongues of fire a foot or more in length.” Combustion this intense could generate steam. The railroad from Cairo to Alexandria, imposed on the Abbas Pasha by the English in the early 1850s, runs through several bustling necropolises; Egypt had no indigenous coal and very little wood. A small item in the September 27, 1859, edition of the Syracuse Daily Standard reads: “Egypt has 300 miles of railroad. On the first locomotive run, mummies were used for fuel, making a hot fire. The supply of mummies is said to be almost inexhaustible, and are used by the cord.” Dard Hunter’s Papermaking cites an informant’s report that “during a ten-year period the locomotives of Egypt17 made use of no other fuel than that furnished by the well-wrapped, compact mummies.”

  But Deck’s geological training convinced him that there was a better way for entrepreneurs to profit from Egypt’s buried resources.18 He estimated that each mummy would yield on average eight pounds of linen, of a quality ideal for modern papermaking; and the “superior class of mummies” would yield much more than that. A mummy from the collection of one Mr. Davidson, Deck reports, was bandaged in nearly three hundred yards of fabric, “which weighed, when bleached, 32 lbs.” You could get dozens of four-page newspapers out of thirty-two pounds of linen. And there would be secondary compensations, as well, since within the layers of linen would reside winged orbs and other bijouterie with resale value; and the distillation of the “animal remains” would produce aromatic gums, such as olibanum, “issoponax,” and ambergris. Even the bituminous compounds employed in the
embalming of the “inferior mummies” could be made into varnishes and machinery oils, according to Deck. Mummy soap was another of his suggestions. He possesses, he says, paper samples available for inspection, including banknote and writing stock “of the finest but toughest texture” made from cloth from the tombs of the kings at Thebes.

  A preliminary sketch of Deck’s proposal appeared in 1847, in the Spettatore Egiziano, a newspaper overseen by the Abbas Pasha in Cairo. I haven’t been able to track this paper down, but Punch saw the item and produced an anonymous poem about it in the May 29, 1847, issue. “Cheops and Ramses, shake in your cere-cloths!” the poet writes:

  They’re going to take the bier-cloths

  That wrap the sons and daughters of old Nile,

  From gilded kings to rough-dressed rank and file,

  And turn them into paper!

  Scientific American also got wind of the article, and published a brief note entitled “New Speculation” on June 19, 1847:

  Mehemet Ali has found a new source of revenue, in the fine linen in which the immense deposits of mummies are wrapped, by applying it to the manufacture of paper. Calculations, founded upon mummy statistics, make the linen swathings of the ancient Egyptians worth $21,000,000. This is better than stealing pennies from the eyes of dead men.

  In England, the paper industry possibly took the hint: Munsell’s record for 1850 includes for the first time a mention of Egyptian rags—twenty-three tons19 of them—imported by Great Britain. Then Deck sailed for America, and in 1854 his expanded proposal appeared in a publication received by some of New York City’s leading printers, newspaper editors, and papermakers: the yearly Transactions of the American Institute, a New York society devoted to the advancement of industrial and agricultural arts. Deck was aware that some readers, the “over sensitive,” may be repulsed by the notion of large-scale mummy mining, and he says that he himself would hesitate to despoil the fascinating science of archaeology of its choicest gems, “unless the requirements of the age demand it.” He poses this question for the squeamish:

  I would ask them whether it is not preferable to employ clean and sound linen wrappings from a virgin mummy to the dubious rags collected from the loathsome persons of the Lazaroni who swarm the quays of the chief seaports of Italy and Spain, and are equally the pest and annoyance of travellers to the interior, and from which source more than four-fifths of the present raw material for paper is obtained.

  A modern-day Abelard and Heloise, he suggests, might soon correspond on stationery that was once the “chemisette enveloping the bosom of Joseph’s fair temptress”—i.e., enveloping the corpse of Potiphar’s wife. And was it not conceivable that “a sheet of the ‘New-York Times’ be issued on the indestructible shroud of Moses’s fairer (Pharaoh)20 stepmother”? And the supply, oh, the supply! It was beyond calculation. There weren’t only humans in those mummy pits, after all. There were all the wrappings of crocodiles and cats, and those of the sacred bulls at Dashour, the burned bones of which, as Deck points out, were already being used to clarify syrup in the sugar refineries of lower Egypt. The tenderness that other cultures reserve for infants—the swaddling and cradling and bathing—Egyptian culture redirected at their dead. Dr. Deck invites inquiries from “companies or private speculators.”

  Did the rag dealers and papermakers ever act on these suggestions? We know that Egyptian rags appeared for the first time in America in 1855, exactly contemporary with the publication21 of Deck’s proposal: one J. Priestly bought 1,215 bales22 of Egyptian rags at a little over four cents a pound. The next year, a reporter for the New York Tribune wrote: “It is within23 a very short time that rags have come from the Nile, and now it is quite a business. About two and a quarter millions of pounds came to New York from Alexandria last year.” That’s an awful lot of Nile rags. Some of these imports might have come from living people, but many, it seems fairly certain, came from the long dead. A number of the Alexandrian bales found their way up the Hudson and west as far as Syracuse, where the Syracuse Daily Standard—the same paper that would soon publish the tidbit about the Egyptian railroad’s fuel—printed a veiled confession in its July 31, 1856, issue:

  Rags from Egypt.—Our Daily is now printed on paper made from rags imported directly from the land of the Pharaohs, on the banks of the Nile. They were imported by Mr. G. W. Ryan, the veteran paper manufacturer at Marcellus Falls, in this county, and he thinks them quite as good as the general run of English and French rags.

  News of papermaker Ryan’s novel material reached an editorial writer for The Albany Journal, who described a paper “made from the wrappages24 of mummies.” The editorialist asked, “Could anything better illustrate. . . the intense materialism of America?” In 1858, the Syracuse Daily Standard included another corroborating tidbit: a Boston importer had bought forty thousand pounds of linen rags “said to be taken from Egyptain [sic] mummies”; when he threshed them, he produced thirteen thousand pounds of sand. And in 1866 a clergyman gave a sermon in which he claimed that during the Civil War, a New York merchant sold a shipload of mummies to a papermaker in Connecticut, who threw them all “into the hopper.”25 Said the clergyman to his parishioners: “And the words I am now reading to you, are written on some of this paper.”

  Dard Hunter was oddly hesitant26 about the mummies. He didn’t mention the clergyman’s tale (given in Munsell’s Chronology), he doubted the existence of the Syracuse “Rags from Egypt” item, and, although he included further reports of mummy linen in paper mills in Broadalbin, New York, and Gardiner, Maine (the Maine rag-sorters attributed a typhoid epidemic to the Egyptian linen), he wanted us to imagine that the “grewsome” material was used to make wrapping paper, not printing paper.

  But upstate paper companies often supplied New York printers—the New York Tribune, for instance, got its paper from a mill near Niagara Falls—and Deck hadn’t established himself near Printing House Square in order to argue the cause of wrapping paper. Nor would the gentlemen of the American Institute (whose members included Horace Greeley,27 the Tribune’s editor; Richard Hoe,28 the leading manufacturer of printing presses; and Nathaniel Currier, of Currier and Ives) have bothered to publish Deck’s “On a Supply of Paper Material from the Mummy Pits of Egypt,” following an article about street-paving, if the idea had appalled them. On the contrary, the idea interested them. Why not make mummies into newsboys, speaking in ink-begotten Bodoni?

  Was The New York Times (or the Tribune, or the Sun) ever printed on stock made, at least in part, from Egyptian mummies? Only a microscopic analysis of the constituent pulps would tell for sure, and even then the microscope might fail us, since papermakers mixed their furnish the way whiskey blenders29 mix their mashes, adding several pulps to one vat. One hesitates, in any case, to chop hundreds of little test samples out of old pages in the service of science—first do no harm. But there is a fair chance, I think, that some of the remaining bound volumes of the biggest New York dailies from 1855 through, say, 1870 entomb more than the history of the United States.

  I called the Syracuse University Library and the Syracuse Public Library to see whether they still owned their old volumes of the Syracuse Daily Standard, since it is the one newspaper that we know was printed on Nile rags. They don’t. A firm called Hall and McChesney,30 long gone, microfilmed the Standard on acetate stock sometime before 1972, and both libraries deemed it an acceptable substitute. On microfilm, the “Rags from Egypt” page is blurred but legible, except at the outermost corners. The Syracuse Public Library gave its volumes of the Standard to the Onondaga Historical Association, which accepted them even though they had no space and already had their own copy. Richard Wright, the director of the Historical Association in the seventies, went through the duplicate set of papers clipping items of interest: he and his wife discovered several of the choicest mummy quotations I have cited here.

  Both of the Wrights are gone now, but their files of local history are not. Judy Haven, the Historical Association’s libraria
n until 2000, is not sure how much longer they can hold on to their mass of papers—they have no money, there have been water problems in the basement, and people don’t understand that a historical society needs public support to function. “Everybody wants us to hang on to the newspapers,” she said, “but nobody wants to help us with the cost of storing them in any way.” The pages of the Daily Standard’s mummy issue rattle when you turn them.

  CHAPTER 7

  * * *

  Already Worthless

  And that’s why, when I was reading Brother Lemberg’s quietly titled work, “A Life-Cycle Cost Analysis1 for the Creation, Storage, and Dissemination of a Digitized Document Collection,” which proposes to pay for the digitization of American libraries by annihilating thousands of established book collections, I thought of Dr. Deck. Four hundred million library discards? Of course not that many will end up going, just as Dr. Deck’s entrepreneurial idea didn’t in the end consume five hundred million mummies; instead American papermakers learned how to handle wood pulp, while in under-forested England, esparto grass became (Munsell writes) “the most valuable fibre2 yet discovered as a substitute for that of linen.” (Esparto, not wood pulp, was the dominant English papermaking furnish even after the Second World War, until Swedish wood-pulp suppliers dumped their product on the British market and forced esparto out.)