by Ian Sansom
The window is wide open, a white curtain moves in the breeze and I am panicked, my heart climbing steps up my chest, because on the desk there are masses and masses of tiny pieces of paper—some in small stacks but others spread out all over. There are so many tatters of paper that the desk is not big enough, and the workers have started to lay them out on top of the filing cabinet as well. The pieces are different sizes, from a fifth of an A4 page to only a couple of centimetres square—and there is nothing, nothing to stop them flying around the room and out the window.
The director of the Stasi File Authority explains the immensity of the task: one worker reconstructs on average ten pages per day; forty workers are employed on the reconstruction; therefore, per year of 250 working days, forty workers reconstruct about 100,000 pages. Each sack contains on average 2,500 pages. Which means that to reconstruct the contents of fifteen thousand sacks will take forty workers . . . approximately 375 years. Of the remaking of many books there is no end.
As individuals, of course, as citizens, or immigrants, refugees, guest workers, travelers or tourists, we don’t have that kind of time to play with. So it’s perhaps no surprise that many of us keep on frantically building our own miniature memory palaces out of paper—from diaries, photographs, newspaper cuttings, certificates, programs, report cards, menus, and all the other shreddable, scrapbookable ephemera of our lives. If the institutional archive is where data on us is kept, our diaries and scrapbooks and photographs are where we keep data on ourselves, our hopes, our dreams and our failures; our very own Legitimationspapiere.
12
FIVE LEAVES LEFT*
(*The title of Nick Drake’s 1969 debut album, alluding to the phrase “Only Five Leaves Left,” printed in packs of Rizla cigarette papers, indicating that only five papers remain.)
Machine-made simulated vellum
The Montgolfier brothers send up their balloon
Montgolfier balloon, engraving © The Bridgeman Art Library Ltd.
In 1861 the journalist, playwright and cofounder of the satirical magazine Punch, Henry Mayhew, gathered together the three separately published volumes of his bestselling books of interviews into one: London Labour and the London Poor; Cyclopaedia of the Conditions and Earnings of Those That Will Work, Those That Cannot Work, And Those That Will Not Work. Mayhew was an oral historian—the Studs Terkel of his day—and his was a modest attempt, in his own words, to “publish the history of a people, from the lips of the people themselves,” and in so doing to “give the rich a more intimate knowledge of the sufferings, and the frequent heroism under those sufferings, of the poor,” and thus “to bestir themselves to improve the condition of a class of people whose misery, ignorance, and vice, amidst all the immense wealth and great knowledge of ‘the first city in the world,’ is, to say the very least, a national disgrace to us.”
Vigorous, single-minded and determined to cause as much controversy as possible, Mayhew interviewed everyone, from prostitutes to thieves to cigar-end collectors to bone-grubbers, meat dealers, piemen, dog-dung finders, sewer hunters, mud-larks—and every kind of paper seller. He was nothing if not thorough. He interviewed sellers of pamphlets, and he interviewed sellers of tracts. He interviewed sellers of race cards, sellers of playing cards, sellers of almanacs, “conundrums,” engravings, prints, pictures, and “patterers,” those at the very bottom end of the market who were “engaged in vending last dying speeches and confessions . . . accounts of fabulous duels between ladies of fashion—of apocryphal elopements, or fictitious love-letters of sporting noblemen . . . assassinations and sudden deaths of eminent individuals . . . awful tragedies, including mendacious murders, impossible robberies, and delusive suicides.” But beyond and below even this lowly class of paper peddlers, he discovered, was another caste of people engaged in a profession “the most curious of any in the hands of the class I now treat of”: the wastepaper collectors. “Some may have formed the notion that waste paper is merely that which is soiled or torn, or old numbers of newspapers, or other periodical publications; but this is merely a portion of the trade, as the subsequent account will show.”
Mayhew’s subsequent account does indeed show the most curious of trades. The wastepaper collectors were canny, ruthless scavengers—Mayhew estimated that there were about sixty men engaged in the trade in London, who would earn between fifteen and thirty-five shillings a week—visiting offices, publishers, coffee shops, printers, publicans, anywhere and everywhere in pursuit of their precious. Interviewed by Mayhew, one collector enumerated the kinds of paper he collected:
I’ve had Bibles . . . Testaments, Prayer-books, Companions to the Altar, and Sermons and religious works . . . Roman Catholic books . . . Watts’ and Wesley’s hymns . . . I’ve dealt in tragedies and comedies, old and new, cut and uncut—they’re best uncut, for you can make them into sheets then—and farces, and books of the opera. I’ve had scientific and medical works of every possible kind, and histories, and travels, and lives, and memoirs . . . Poetry, ay, many a hundred weight; Latin and Greek (sometimes), and French, and other foreign languages . . . Pamphlets I’ve had by the ton . . . Missionary papers of all kinds. Parliamentary papers . . . Railway prospectuses . . . Children’s copy-books . . . Old account-books of every kind . . . Dictionaries of every sort . . . Music books, lots of them. Manuscripts . . . Letters on every possible subject . . . An old man dies, you see, and his papers are sold off, letters and all; that’s the way; get rid of the old rubbish, as soon as the old boy’s pointing his toes to the sky. What’s old letters worth, when the writers are dead and buried? Why, perhaps 1½d. a pound, and it’s a rattling big letter that will weigh half-an-ounce. O, it’s a queer trade, but there’s many worse.
O, it’s a queer trade, but there are many worse. Mayhew’s wastepaper sellers passed their wares on to “cheesemongers, buttermen, butchers, fishmongers, poulterers, pork and sausage-sellers, sweet-stuff-sellers, tobacconists, chandlers—and indeed all who sell provisions”—just as I’ve been offering my wastepaper to you.
There is much, of course, that I haven’t been able to include, and much that I haven’t been able to salvage. On a daily basis we all still use so much paper to note, to register, to measure, to account for, to classify, authorize, endorse and generally to tot up, gee-up and make good our lives that it would be a Mayhew-like or Joycean undertaking to provide a full history of all the paper in just one life on just one day, never mind in the lives of nations and peoples over two thousand years. Personally, this week alone, I have fingered and handled newspapers, magazines, books, notebooks, notepads, files, agendas, programs, dry-cleaning tickets, cinema tickets, parking tickets, boarding passes, peer review forms, school reports, and bills, invoices and packaging of all kinds, and my pockets as always are stuffed full with train tickets, money and receipts, so much so that sometimes at night I simply shake the contents out onto the floor, creating a paper shower that soon becomes a drift that eventually, if allowed, would overcome first my bedroom, then my house and then finally my life, like the famous American Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley, whose brownstone on Fifth Avenue in New York was filled from floor to ceiling with a lifetime’s junk, and who eventually died in squalor and notoriety in 1947, with the police removing over a hundred tons of garbage from their home, Langley having been crushed to death in one of the booby-trapped newspaper tunnels of his own construction, and the blind and paralyzed Homer perishing of starvation some days later.
Much of it must be tossed, then, and of course most of the paper in my life is dross anyway, but there is so much else from the long history of paper that one would want to sort through and to rescue from waste: the odd, adjunct history of paperweights and paper knives, for example, from the first exhibition of paperweights in Vienna in 1845 to the procedures used for the identification of paper knives in criminal history; the cult history of wrestling and boxing posters, which once adorned the barbers and grocers of my youth, and were triumphs of the art of the High Street jobbing pr
inter; the natural history of paper in gardening, horticulture and agriculture, beginning with, say, the “melon paper-House” that Gilbert White made for himself in 1757, “8 feet long & 5 feet wide: to be covered with the best writing paper,” oiled with linseed oil, to make it proof against the rain, and ending with the latest graph- and vector-based methods for the construction and analysis of data in landscape ecology; the true story behind James Wyld II’s Monster Globe, erected in the center of Leicester Square in 1851, which stood for ten years, built ostensibly as Wyld’s contribution to the Great Exhibition, but was in effect a giant advertisement for his map and globe company; the magical properties of “soap paper,” as described in an article in The Paper-Maker and British Paper Trade Journal in 1915, which consisted of little booklets of satin paper coated with a compound of glycerine, spirit and soap, a boon to hikers and picnickers, who “need only extract a basinful of water from a clear brook and immerse a page or a small piece of soap paper in it, meantime dabbling it about freely, in order to obtain abundant saponaceous lather suitable for washing hands and face with,” the forerunner of today’s wet wipes; the pioneering work of computer genius David Huffman, developer of so-called Huffman coding, which forms the basis of various back-end applications in digital devices, including JPEG and MP3 files, but who was also a great paper folder, and who in his 1976 paper “Curvature and Creases: A Primer on Paper” explores the relationship between certain features of paper surfaces and computer-aided design; the ingenious history of copying paper, including recipes (such as that for Carbon Duplicating Paper in Pharmaceutical Formulas: Being the Chemist’s Recipe Book, vol. II (1934, revised edition), requiring 12 lbs. of lard, 2½ lbs. of Japan wax, 2 lbs. of Ivory Blue, and 2 lbs. of Prussian Blue); recipes, including one for “Thin Cream Pancakes Call’d a Quire of Paper,” from Mary Kettilby’s A Collection of above three hundred receipts in cookery, physick, and surgery for the use of all good wives, tender mothers and careful nurses, by several hands (1714), a recipe I have tested, purely in the interests of research, which consists mostly of cream, butter, sugar, eggs, flour and sherry, and which I can confirm is absolutely delicious; the serious art and science of paper forensics, as practiced by the doyen of paper historians, Peter Bower, who is the man to go to if you need to find out exactly how much linen was present in a rag-pulp mix in the mid-nineteenth century, and which soaps were used to wash the rags, and which stampers and beaters and sizing agents were used, and which dyes and colors, and how white is the white, and whether the surface finish was achieved by plate glazing or calendering; tales of the last paper-bag merchants in Spitalfields, east London, Gardners Market Sundriesmen, 149 Commercial Street, est. 1870, as related in what is currently one of the world’s hippest blogs, www.spitalfieldslife.com; and the exact meaning of the song “Paper Gangsta” by Lady Gaga (I think she’s complaining about her record label). “If all the earth were paper white/And all the sea were ink,/”Twere not enough for me to write/As my poor heart doth think” (John Lyly). “Tis not enough, but let me present you finally with just a few more pages, a few choice cuts and uncuts from the multi-bale history of paper. Five leaves left: paper and film; paper and fashion; cigarettes; religion; and science.
Daguerreotype of an eclipse of the sun, July 28, 1851
The history of the relationship between paper and film begins early, earlier even than one might expect, at the very beginning of the history of photography, in 1839, when William Henry Fox Talbot, an inventor and scholar of hieroglyphics, revealed to the Royal Society in London the secrets of his revolutionary photogenic drawing method, just as Louis Daguerre was announcing his own copper-plate process for capturing images to the French Academy of Sciences in Paris. In his book The Pencil of Nature (1844), Fox Talbot explains how in 1833 he had been attempting to sketch the scenery of Lake Como, in Italy, using a camera lucida, and that the results were “melancholy to behold.” Nonetheless, this failure, he writes, “led me to reflect on the inimitable beauty of the pictures of nature’s painting which the glass lens of the Camera throws upon the paper in its focus—fairy pictures, creations of a moment, and destined as rapidly to fade away. It was during these thoughts that the idea occurred to me . . . how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper.” Fox Talbot’s early image-fixing experiments required soaking paper in a solution of salt, drying it, and then either brushing or floating the paper on a solution of silver nitrate. This prepared paper would then produce magical results when placed under an object, capturing vivid, ghostly images when exposed for long enough to the light. From these exploratory paper-based beginnings—“fairy pictures”—within thirty years photography was being used, in the words of John Berger, for “police filing, war reporting, military reconnaissance, pornography, encyclopedic documentation, family albums, postcards, anthropological records . . . sentimental moralising, inquisitive probing . . . aesthetic effects, news reporting and formal portraiture.” By 1861 over two hundred photographic studios had opened in London alone, with nearly three thousand registered photographers at work in the capital, and throughout the rest of its history, through all of its complex physical and chemical developments and iterations—from heliographs to calotypes to daguerreotypes, niépceotypes, wet plates, dry plates and every other innovation since—photography has continued to rely on paper, either to print out or to print on. Even digital photography, which can do without film and chemical processing, still relies largely on paper to be printed, exhibited, and proudly displayed in frames.
And as with photography, so with cinematography: film has a paper substrate. The history of motion pictures, or at least of moving images, begins with phenakistoscopes and zoetropes, which used static images, usually printed on paper, on spinning disks or cylinders, and one could follow an interesting, flickering paper route the whole way through motion picture history, from the use of cut-paper figures in stop-action animation, say—from the early work of the French cartoonist Émile Eugène Jean Louis Courtet to more recent work by Tim Burton and the Mexican artist Carlos Amorales, reminiscent of the shadow plays of Indonesia (wayang), Turkey (Karagöz-Hacivat plays), and France (les ombres noires)—through the paper print process used to establish copyright of early film negatives, to the famously Benzedrine-driven memo madness of David O. Selznick, and the paperwork nightmares depicted in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985). But the real paper support behind film—cinema’s paper orthotics, as it were, the back brace of cinema—are storyboards. Initially developed at the Walt Disney studios in the early 1930s, these hand-drawn sketches, arranged in sequence to build up narrative scenes from single frames and shots, were first used to direct a live-action film with Gone With the Wind, for which a team of seven artists produced more than 1,500 watercolor sketches—mostly of the burning of Atlanta—that were pasted onto board, and used on location during shooting. Gone With the Wind was released in 1939. What’s remarkable is that at Pixar Animation Studios they’re still using traditional storyboard techniques today, carrying on for all the world like little Poussins—who famously referred to his drawings as “pensées”—using drawings on paper as necessary steps toward high-tech movie making. Harley Jessup, a production designer at Pixar, who worked on Monsters, Inc. and Ratatouille, has described a culture of paper drawing and picture making at the company’s headquarters in California that would not seem out of place in an Impressionist’s studio in nineteenth-century Paris. There are daily life-drawing and painting classes, open to everyone, and the story department employs between five and fifteen full-time artists solely to work on storyboards. And a storyboard, as Jessup explains, just to be clear, “is literally a 4˝ x 8˝ (120 cm. x 240 cm.) bulletin board covered with rows of 3.5˝ x 8˝ (9 cm. x 20 cm.) hand-drawn story panels”: no gimmicks, no gizmos, no computer-graphic design. These story panels are scanned and cut together to produce story reels—basic black-and-white cartoon versions of the film—and are only then replaced by
computer-graphic sequences, developed using yet further hand-drawn sketches, paintings and sculptures. Jessup adds up the number of storyboard drawings produced for various Pixar films thus:
A Bug’s Life (1998)
27,555
Toy Story 2 (1999)
28,244
Monsters, Inc. (2001)
46,024
Finding Nemo (2003)
43,536
The Incredibles (2004)
21,081
Cars (2006)
47,000
Ratatouille (2007)
72,000
So, no signs of a paperless office at Pixar.
Nor in the great fashion houses of the world. It’s impossible to imagine a fashion house without its moodboards and portfolios, pieced together using pens, pencils, color photocopies, scissors and paste. The fashion designer John Galliano, for example, puts together vast research books: “I start with research and from there I build the muse, the idea, tell a story and develop a character, a look and then a collection.” Matthew Williamson does anime-style sketches. Peter Jensen draws with a black fineliner on white copier paper, creating images that look like cartoons. Vivienne Westwood draws clothes without bodies, like funeral garb. (It’s perhaps worth noting that the greatest ever television series about fashion—Ugly Betty—is set not in a fashion house, but in a fashion magazine, the fictional Mode: couture always makes most sense when reflected and refracted in coated glossy paper.) Bespoke tailors create beautiful suits from brown-paper patterns by rock of eye, while my mother and grandmother made our clothes largely by guesswork and Butterick and Simplicity patterns, bought second-hand from market stalls, or collected from magazines, and shared among friends and neighbors, samizdat-style, so that everyone we knew ended up wearing odd but identical homemade denim-look leisurewear. The rise of the paper clothes pattern, first developed in the USA in the 1860s by the indomitable Madame Demorest (née Ellen Curtis) and Ebenezer Butterick, who built vast empires on the back of flimsy tissue-paper patterns, arguably led to the democratization of fashion: paper made clothes.