Paper

by Ian Sansom

  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 sacralized and fetishized, 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. 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, remarques, 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 organized my notes into folders. I have disorganized 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 colors). I’m sure there are easier ways of writing books.

  1

  A MIRACLE OF INSCRUTABLE INTRICACY

  Looking at that blank paper continually dropping, dropping, dropping, my mind ran on in wonderings of those strange uses to which those thousand sheets eventually would be put. All sorts of writings would be writ on those now vacant things—sermons, lawyers’ briefs, physicians’ prescriptions, love-letters, marriage certificates, bills of divorce, registers of births, death-warrants, and so on, without end . . . “Yours is a most wonderful factory. Your great machine is a miracle of inscrutable intricacy.”

  HERMAN MELVILLE, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” (1855)

  Japanese tissue paper with fine swirls of fiber

  Making Japanese paper:

  1. Stripping the bark

  2. Soaking the bark in water

  3. Beating the fibers to a pulp

  4. Placing the paper mold 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 fibers 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 gray mush. You take a wooden frame with a sievelike 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 fiber 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 papermaking in seventeenth-century England, for example, from his diary, dated August 24, 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).

  Papermaking: the same yesterday, today and tomorrow

  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 mold 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 porridgelike substance produced—the “stock” or “stuff”—can then be further diluted and undergo further beating, or fibrillation, to cut and break up the fibers 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 meters long, costing millions, running twenty-four hours a day and capable of producing hundreds of thousands of tons 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 molds, 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 that 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 dispatch 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.

  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 that 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 behavior 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 January 18, 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 (approximately $81,240), 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.