by Ian Sansom
We’ll begin with a paper chase (the paper chase, or, rather, The Paper Chase was of course a TV series that ran during the late 1970s and mid-1980s, set at Harvard Law School, in which the veteran actor John Houseman played irascible Professor Charles W. Kingsfield, who would begin each episode with the memorable admonition, “The study of law is something new and unfamiliar to most of you, unlike any other schooling you have ever known before. You teach yourselves the law, but I train your minds. You come in here with a skull full of mush and, if you survive, you leave thinking like a lawyer”). Perhaps the most famous paper chase in history takes place in E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children (1906), which is itself a kind of paper chase. In the novel—as you will doubtless recall from the film—the railway children’s father has been sentenced to prison, having been charged with selling state secrets, on the evidence of some letters found in his desk. Eldest daughter Bobbie discovers this fact from a chance glance at a pile of papers (“A sheet of old newspaper wrapped round a parcel—just a little chance like that—had given the secret to her”), and the novel’s pivotal paper chase—a game of hare and hounds, in which one of the participants gets injured in a railway tunnel, and is rescued by the children—serves as a device to bring the children together with the kind but nameless “old gentleman” who then assists them in their quest to free their father. Thus, the paper chase resolves the initial paper misunderstanding: plot almost as a form of paper folding, or gift wrapping. (Might one suggest a kind of paper Poetics? An origami Aristotle? A fold-up Freytag triangle? Rising action as creases; crisis and climax as folds; denouement a form of unwrapping?)
I can trace my own paper trail back to its roots in family gatherings and special occasions long ago, when my grandfather—my mother’s father, who was one of the first Allied troops into Belsen, a man of few words who spent all his money on greyhounds, and whom we all adored, and who died young, and for whom my sister and I would dutifully make cigarettes from Rizlas and Golden Virginia in his solid-brass cigarette machine—would roll sheets of newspaper into a tube, tear out a section from the middle, and then magically pull up a ladder. He called it Jacob’s Ladder: “And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it . . . And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven” (Genesis 28:11, 19). If not exactly the gate of heaven, it was at least my introduction to the possibilities of paper as a source of fun and entertainment, a source that never seemed to dry up: one uncle’s party trick was to pass his body through a sheet of paper; another played paper and comb; and my father could pour water into rolled-up cones of paper and make the water disappear. Paper was cheap and it was plentiful: the stuff of everyday magic. Houdini’s Paper Magic: The Whole Art of Performing with Paper, Including Paper Tearing, Paper Folding and Paper Puzzles, published in 1922, remains a fine compilation of all the essential party paper tricks (including, I now discover, all the tricks performed by my family), and is dedicated by Houdini to his private secretary, John William Sargent, “to whom I am indebted for many a cheerful hour of interesting conversation, and who always endeavored to make me look upon life as a pleasant voyage instead of a continual struggle for existence and survival of the fittest.” Paper eases our passage through life, through games, tricks and puzzles.
Left to our own devices, there are a thousand ways to pleasure ourselves with paper. We might doodle or squiggle, revealing ourselves on the page (and to the likes of D.W. Winnicott, who devised what he called a Squiggle Game, in order to elicit and intuit the thoughts and feelings of children in psychotherapeutic conversations). We might try our hand at crosswords. We might go spotting trains. With a friend we might play hangman, or tic-tac-toe, or—much better—sprouts, a marvelously simple and infuriating game invented by two Cambridge mathematicians in the 1960s, which makes tic-tac-toe look like child’s play (for sproutster rules and regulations see the World Game of Sprouts Association online, www.wgosa .org). At a party, we might hit a piñata, which is not necessarily made of papier-mâché, though often it is. (The word derives from the Italian pignatta, meaning “fragile pot,” and a piñata could be a fragile pot, though these days it’s much more likely to be a cardboard donkey, or a child-size Homer Simpson made in China and filled with Haribo, an ugly mass-market version of the classic piñata, which is one among the many products of the traditional Mexican paper crafts of cartonería, amate and alebrije.) Exhausted from our piñata-smashing, we might then retire to the parlor to make paper models or dress up paper dolls: personally, I have a working paper clock kit that I’m saving for retirement, and I dream of the Micromodels Vatican; in Japan, the making of anesama ningyo (paper dolls) remains popular; the French still have their pantin, the little paper puppet; and there are, or there were, paper Barbies, and countless other cut-out-and-keeps from children’s and women’s magazines, the first English paper doll, produced in the early 1800s, being the memorably named Little Fanny. Of paper planes, more later.
Toy theater from the Pollock collection
Board games and toy theater, © Pollocks Toy Museum
By the mid-nineteenth century, in Europe at least, the manufacture of paper toys and amusements had grown into an industry—there were peep shows and panoramas, and slot books, and of course the famous toy theaters, those miniature theaters with their actors made from printed cardboard that could be cut, pasted, colored and embellished, and through which and within which and upon which generations of children first found imaginative expression. We know from stories and letters and memoirs that toy theaters and their theatricals were important in the formation of the imaginative lives of, among others, Dickens (“Out of this delight springs the toy-theatre . . . a teeming world of fancies so suggestive and all-embracing, that . . . I see dark, dirty, real Theatres in the day-time, adorned with these associations as with the freshest garlands of the rarest flowers, and charming me yet”); Lewis Carroll (who exhibited his toys and gadgets in his rooms at Christ Church); John Gielgud (who for Christmas in 1911, aged seven, was given an elaborate toy theater, which became his childhood obsession); the novelist Elizabeth Bowen (who wrote an essay on the influence of toys on the imagination); and perhaps above all, Robert Louis Stevenson, a writer who never lost touch with his inner child. In a little essay, “A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured” (1884), Stevenson recalls the childhood thrill of shopping for paper characters for his theater: “Every sheet we fingered was another lightning glance into obscure, delicious story; it was like wallowing in the raw stuff of story-books.” Stevenson praises in particular the work of one of the publishers of what were called “juvenile dramas,” Skelt, going so far as to call all true works of art “Skeltery,” born of the kingdom of “Skeltdom”:
What am I? what are life, art, letters, the world, but what my Skelt has made them? He stamped himself upon my immaturity. The world was plain before I knew him, a poor penny world; but soon it was all coloured with romance . . . Indeed, out of this cut-and-dry, dull, swaggering, obtrusive, and infantile art, I seem to have learned the very spirit of life’s enjoyment . . . acquired a gallery of scenes and characters with which, in the silent theatre of the brain, I might enact all novels and romances; and took from these rude cuts an enduring and transforming pleasure.
A moving testimony to the power of paper. But then suddenly, at the end of his essay, in characteristic fashion (this is the author, after all, not only of Treasure Island, but also of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), Stevenson torments himself with a horrible vision:
I have a dream at times that is not all a dream. I seem to myself to wander in a ghostly street . . . There in a dim shop, low in the roof and smelling strong of glue and footlights, I find myself quaking treaty with great Skelt himself, the aboriginal all dusty from the tomb. I buy, with what a choking heart—I buy them all, all but the pantomimes; I pay my mental money, and go for
th; and lo! the packets are dust.
And so the paper drama concludes the way all human dramas must: in destruction. Paper goes the way of all flesh.
The production of toy theaters for children seems to have developed from the production of theatrical prints—collectible images of actors and actresses. But what of all our other myriad games and toys? Where did they all come from? And how did they begin? Monopoly? Scrabble? Ludo? Clue? Scrabble? Pictionary? Trivial Pursuit? In the standard Oxford history of board games, A History of Board-Games Other Than Chess (1952), H. J. R. Murray, having catalogued some 270 games, including the Tibetan “Mig-mang” (“Said to resemble chess, but more likely draughts”), the Indian “Ratti-chitti-bakri” and the Icelandic “Ofanfelling,” speculates about the ancient origins of such games:
In the heat of the day when work in the open air is too arduous, or when the day’s work is over and the daily needs of his family are met, man’s innate urge to be something still impels him to action, if only to the handling of objects at hand, whether natural like pebbles, or some of his household goods of his own making, at first aimlessly, but as soon as his attention is held, to explore their capabilities for new uses.
As we’ve seen before, capabilities for new uses emerge particularly quickly with the addition of paper—new forms of advertising, new possibilities in art, new ways of thinking. Paper as manure: plant stuff in it and watch it grow. Many board games have been played perfectly well for centuries with or without paper—draughts and chess, Parcheesi, lotto—but during the nineteenth century, with improvements in printing and in papermaking, and particularly with the invention of chromo-lithography in the 1870s, board games became not merely popular but products.
Late-nineteenth-century board game
Board games and toy theater, © Pollocks Toy Museum
In America, board-game manufacturers sprang up everywhere—from Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley in Massachusetts, to Selchow & Righter and Clark & Sowdon in New York—and it’s possible to trace the family history of almost all of today’s board games back to their cardboard-boxed, chromolithographed nineteenth-century American ancestors. Monopoly, for example, is clearly derived from games such as Monopolist (1885), The Checkered Game of Life (1860), The Mansion of Happiness (1843) and Bulls and Bears: The Great Wall St. Game (1883). Trivial Pursuit bears more than a passing resemblance to The World’s Educator, produced by the W. S. Reed Toy Company in 1887, which came in a sturdy wooden box containing two thousand questions on sets of beautifully colored cards. Scrabble is based on Anagrams. Etcetera, etcetera—all board games come to resemble one another the closer one looks, receding as far as the eye can see.
The dominant player in the American board-games industry during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was McLoughlin Brothers, which claimed in its catalogues that “Games are a necessity in every family, and parents should see to it that their children are well supplied with them. They not only amuse, but serve to instruct and educate them.” Instruction and education took many forms—McLoughlin and its rivals produced alphabet boxes, spelling slips and word games aplenty, encouraging numeracy, literacy and good old-fashioned reasoning skills. They also encouraged competitiveness, ruthlessness and an echt American can-do spirit, with rags-to-riches games such as Game of the District Messenger Boy, Or Merit Rewarded (1886) and its various spin-offs, including The Game of the Telegraph Boy, Or Merit Rewarded (1888) and The Game of the Little Volunteer (1898). Parker Brothers’ Pit (1904) taught commodity trading; J. Ottmann’s The Sociable Telephone (1902) taught good manners; and the Rhode Island Game Company’s The Great Game: Uncle Sam at War with Spain (1898) reminded children of the new nation’s proud history.
All of this educational earnestness may explain why so many proprietary board games, even to this day, are—frankly—so utterly and profoundly dull, and why many of us are much happier with an entirely different kind of cardboard amusement at Christmas and on holidays and holy days: the humble jigsaw. The novelist Margaret Drabble provides a useful reminder of the great solitary pleasure to be had from “assembling little pieces of cardboard into a preordained pattern” in her fully interlocking memoir, The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws (2009), in which she classifies puzzling as one of the Halbkünste, a half-craft, somewhere between an “idle diversion and domestic economy.”
In fact, as Drabble acknowledges, even puzzles originated with a serious educational purpose. The origins of the modern puzzle are usually traced to the work of one man, John Spilsbury, who made a dissected map in 1762 while serving as apprentice to Thomas Jefferys, geographer to George III. Young Spilsbury quickly established himself as a commercial map-maker specializing in dissected maps, and was soon advertising himself as an “Engraver and Map Dissector in Wood, in order to facilitate the Teaching of Geography.” The children’s literature historian Megan A. Norcia claims that puzzles were indeed an important part of teaching geography to children, particularly in Britain, and particularly in relation to the nation’s imperial achievements and ambitions. Puzzles, according to Norcia, helped teach generations of British children “imperial skills such as discovery, collection, administration, organization and discipline.” This grand imperial puzzle purpose may perhaps have pertained during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when a puzzle was printed on paper, colored by hand, and pasted on mahogany or cedar about an eighth of an inch thick—more like a tool than a toy—but by the 1880s the puzzle industry was mostly using thin cardboard instead of wood, and by the 1930s steel die-cutting had replaced the need for costly fretsaw or bandsaw workmanship, allowing for cheap mass production, and so finally the puzzle became a disposable item of cheap amusement, available to all. (The puzzle historian—there are such—Anne D. Williams traces the beginning of the “puzzle craze” in America to one year, and one particular month, June 1932, when the Prophylactic Brush Company of Florence, Massachusetts, offered a free fifty-piece puzzle to toothbrush buyers; the craze so gripped the nation that by 1933, the American puzzle industry was turning out ten million puzzles per week, with the Eureka Jig Saw Puzzle Company producing a gargantuan thirteen-foot-long puzzle of fifty thousand pieces.)
Paper toys and games can be used to educate, then, and to establish and encourage social norms, behaviors and understandings. They can be used to amuse and to entertain. And they can of course be used for gambling. Any thin, stiff piece of material can be used as a playing card: playing cards can and have been made from metal, from leather, and from wood; an iron pack of cards produced in Vienna in the nineteenth century is estimated to have weighed over a pound, and in India there have been cards made of ivory, of stiffened fabric and of mother-of-pearl. But there’s nothing quite as handy for a rubber of bridge or a quick game of canasta as a deck of round-cornered, pneumatic-finished, double-ended quality card stock playing cards. Detlef Hoffmann notes in The Playing Card: An Illustrated History (1973) that “This is the advantage of playing cards: they can be painted or printed in any manner desired and it is only necessary for their value to be shown at some point on the card.” The obvious advantage of paper playing cards is that they are also infinitely reproducible: one deck is as good as another, although anyone who has ever been on vacation will have been shocked to find that suit marks differ from country to country (the Spanish and the Italians with their cups and batons and money and swords; the Swiss with their shields, flowers, bells and acorns; the Germans with their hearts, leaves, bells and acorns; and the Koreans . . . the Koreans traditionally had an eight-suit deck of man, fish, crow, pheasant, antelope, star, rabbit and horse, which must have made for quite a game of rummy). Some nations, furthermore, have only twenty-four cards to a deck, and others more than a hundred. Japanese karuta card games, which include the poetry game uta-garuta, and the monster-matching game obake karuta, use many more. The permutations—and the games—are endless, but the cards remain the same.
One legend has it that playing cards were invent
ed by the wife of an Indian maharajah in an attempt to stop her husband fiddling with his beard; another, that they developed among the concubines of the Chinese imperial harem, to while away the long evenings in the inner chambers. It’s more likely that paper playing cards date back to about the twelfth century in China and Korea, and somehow found their way to Europe—maybe via India or Persia—where, according to Roger Tilley in A History of Playing Cards (1973), “The love of card games proved highly contagious, in the manner of a pandemic disease infecting people far and wide.” And nowhere more contagious than in gambling-friendly Russia, where in the late nineteenth century 14,400 packs of cards were being produced per day. In his 1928 essay “Dostoevsky and Parricide,” Freud famously connected the gambling instinct with a kind of masochistic criminality, a trait perhaps as common among writers as among Russians. (Dostoevsky’s short novel The Gambler, published in 1867 and written to pay off gambling debts, while gambling at Baden-Baden, offers an insight into the mind not only of the gambler, but of the artist.) In America during the late nineteenth century, the manufacturers Russell, Morgan & Co. were dealing out just 1,600 packs a day, though as the greatly enlarged and amalgamated United States Playing Card Company, they are now the largest manufacturer of playing cards in the world, selling around a hundred million decks per year: we’re all masochists now. The paper-borne disease persists.