“The fibres seem long enough,” Emily says pensively, her hands moving from one lily leaf to another. I’m not sure she even sees the searing red and yellow trumpets of the blooms.
“And that’s good?” I ask.
“We’re looking for a fibre that will feather apart, something that will dissolve in water and suspend, but also bond with other fibres, not hang out on top on its own. So yes, that’s good.” And for the first time that day, Emily flashes me a smile.
For 2,000 years or so, the lion’s share of European writing was done on parchment, the scraped, stretched, dried skin of a goat, sheep, or cow. By the fourteenth century, papermaking had made its way onto the continent, although it was expensive and slow to catch on. In the early 1700s, the invention of the spinning wheel created an explosion in linen goods—shirts, bed linens, towels. Not surprisingly, within a few years, there was a complementary explosion in rags. Rags were so plentiful that the price of rag paper plummeted to about a sixth of that of parchment. Paper was suddenly popular. Soon the demand for paper was so great that the rag trade couldn’t keep up. Rags were imported from Asia and Africa, but even that wasn’t enough. Newspaper owners ran advertisements apologizing for printing only half the news because rags were so scarce.
There’s something prophetic in those 200-year-old ads. The shift from parchment to paper was a direct result of an oversupply of rags. Pulp from the vast and seemingly endless forests replaced rags, and now alarm over disappearing woodlands is fuelling the enthusiasm for digital books.
Buy a paper book, save a herd of goats.
Buy an ereader stocked with sixty-two books and save a tree.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, papermakers were desperate for a more readily available source of cellulose, the essential ingredient in paper. Rags were one option; trees were another. But what about grass? Leaves? Stems? One of the people looking around for a cheap, plentiful alternative was Jacob Christian Schäffer, a German botanist and ornithologist, author, and collector famous for his cabinet of curiosities. He also conducted experiments in electricity, colour, and optics, inventing, among other things, a washing machine, a saw, and a furnace. Between 1765 and 1771, he turned his febrile mind to paper. He spent hours plucking plants and stems from his garden just as Emily and I are doing in mine. He chopped up everything he came across—wasps’ nests, mosses, hops—macerating them to a pulp in “stampers” and making small squares of sample paper. A few years later, an entrepreneurial British papermaker, Matthias Koops, decided straw was the next big thing. (Koops was also the first to produce paper from discarded paper.) He opened a factory near London, England, where he produced reams of straw paper. Basbanes, in his book On Paper, recounts handling a book printed on straw. After 200 years, he writes, the paper still held “the agreeable aroma of fresh-cut grass.”
Hugh trails behind Emily and me as we pause at one plant then another, bagging leaves like forensic samples: hosta, hibiscus, queen of the meadow, hyacinth. Into larger bags, she stuffs stooks of bright green daylily leaves, burgundy canna lily leaves, grey-blue spikes of iris.
Hugh is not as interested in this stage of the papermaking process as I expect him to be. When I ask if he has ever made paper, he tells us that, twenty years ago, he visited Walpole Island First Nation with his two adopted daughters, who are of Cree heritage. Together, they went on a hunt for sweetgrass, used in smudging ceremonies and prized for its sweet vanilla fragrance, even when dried.
“I picked a bundle with the intention of making paper from it. I hoped the paper would pick up the scent.” He soaked the sweetgrass and used the kitchen blender to beat it to a pulp. “Smoke rose from the motor. Verla suggested in no uncertain terms that I should leave that project for a more favourable time.” Hugh sighs. “The paper never got made.”
Emily and I are finished culling leaves. Now we’re filling small plastic bags with flowers, looking around for tough, brightly hued blooms, petals that keep their colour when dried. I suggest sedums. Maybe silene. Astrantia. Bee balm. Spirea.
The flowers are for Hugh. At our first lunch, he brought a sample of what he had in mind for the endpapers: a pale Japanese sheet with a faint pink cast to it, the pink I imagine the poet Xue Tao achieved with hibiscus tea. The surface was strewn with small bits of leaf and petal, exactly the effect I was hoping for when I sprinkled roadside flowers over that first sheet of paper I made with my sons.
In the restaurant, Emily had squinted at the paper Hugh handed her. She held the sheet inches from her face as if, in that moment, nothing else in the world mattered. “It’s not easy,” Emily said then, and she says the same thing now. “It’s not easy, adding bits of flowers to the process.”
She’s squinting again, despite the dark sunglasses. Like many people with albinism, her eyesight is compromised. Sunlight is painful, even under the shade of her thick white lashes. We move deeper into the shadows.
“The flower bits will look like flecks of mud. Or they’ll fade away altogether. There are things you can do, chemicals you can add to keep them looking fresh, but that’s not the way I make paper.” She has an artist’s stubborn confidence in her own vision.
“Not a problem,” Hugh says, repeating the phrase, as he does when he gets excited. “Not a problem. No. No. It’s your paper! Go for it!”
Emily is travelling by train, so we limit ourselves to two rather large soft-sided pieces of hand luggage, stuffed with plant material. Through the summer, she will beat them, species by species, into stuff, making sheet after sheet of test paper. I try to imagine the process, falling back inevitably to the scene at my kitchen counter, the old window screen, the thick oatmeal slurry, my whining boys.
Early in the fall, Emily, Hugh, and I convene again at the Kingston restaurant to see what she’s made.
I gasp as she pulls out what looks like a swirling cloud of green roiling down across a pale landscape.
“I love this!” I say, and she smiles. “Which plant is it?”
“Daylily fibre.” She looks at it critically. “The greener it is, the more fugitive it is,” she says. “Chlorophyll’s not a great dye. With the green stuff, I’m worried that it won’t be stable, that it will fade out over time.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” Hugh is the one squinting now. “You know. You know. It looks muddy to me. Did you try the flowers?”
She pulls out half a dozen sheets labelled Creeping Jenny, Sedum, Violet. Even Hugh has to admit that the strewn leaves and petals look like specks of dirt. Not at all what he was hoping for.
“Commercial printers can do that sort of thing, put flowers in. A paper artist can’t. If that’s the look you want, you should buy ready-made paper.”
I wince. Hugh looks wounded. But she’s right, and he knows it.
Emily offers a compromise. “I’ll use a white base, with the plant material added later. It will look more like a garden flowing through a landscape.”
“You’re the artist,” Hugh says, raising his hand in the air as if he’s calling off a match. “You do what you do. It will be just right.”
PAPERMAKER’S TEARS
Emily scoops something that looks like cooked spinach out of a small plastic bucket and trails it over the water in the wooden box.
Except that it’s not spinach, it’s not water, and it’s not just any old box.
Earlier that spring, I took my Japanese knife to my gardens and hacked down great swaths of daylily leaves: twelfth-of-July lilies, forty feet of them or more; smaller clumps of citrinas, Catherine Woodburys, Crimson Pirates, Gentle Shepherds, Stella d’Oros, and Happy Returns. I drove them to Toronto and left them on the doorstep of Emily’s studio on my way through the city. She was sick and didn’t get to work for several days, by which time the leaves had cooked inside the black plastic to a stinky, slimy mess. So I picked more and stuffed them into garbage bags that I shipped by bus to the city. Emily hydrated t
he pulp and put it through her Valley Hollander beater, which doesn’t cut the fibre, she assures me now, so much as fluff it up, separating it into shorter strands. She keeps the green “stuff” in yogurt containers in the fridge, mushing it into water when she’s ready to make paper.
We are standing in her studio at the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) in Toronto. Other than the paper I made with my sons when they were children, I am a papermaking virgin. Even Hugh has more experience than I. Years ago, when he was teaching a seminar at OCA he called Designing Outside the Box—a skill he has in spades—he met the papermaker Wendy Cain. When she told him she was teaching a workshop near Kingston, he decided to give papermaking a second chance.
“You need to know that when I attend a workshop, I have to be able to produce a masterpiece in the first few days,” says Hugh. “Well, that didn’t happen. I did manage to make a bit of paper, but it was really only suitable for taking home to show Mommy what I had done.”
Emily hands me an apron. “Basically, you can make paper two ways: by dipping the screen in the pulp, which ends up with a very homogenized paper. Or you can make it the Japanese way, by draining pulp through a screen in a box. This process is harder to control, but I seem to need to do things the hard way.”
She says the last bit with a shy smile. She and Hugh make a very good pair.
The papermaking box is properly called a deckle box. This one has been designed and built specifically for The Paradise Project. It is a lovely wooden oblong, with a wall down the middle creating two spaces exactly the size of each endpaper in the book. The endpapers are made in sets of two, so that the design trails from front to back, enclosing the text.
The bottom of the box is screened to let the water flow through, leaving behind a film of fibre. Emily lines both compartments with plastic, then fills them with abacá fibre hydrated to a pale, glutinous liquid. Abacá is a kind of banana tree that grows in South America and the Philippines. Its scientific name is Musa textilis. I like the literary lilt of the name, as if the plant is muse to the paper.
Musa textilis grows quickly to about twelve feet, with the base of the leaves forming a sheath around the trunk to create a kind of false trunk. These sheaths, about twenty-five of them per tree, contain the fine, soft, silky fibres that are often as long as the tree is tall. The fibres, rich in cellulose, lignin, and pectin, were originally used for making rope. Today, most of it is pulped for specialty paper products such as diapers, coffee filters, and money. Abacá fibre is also a favourite of papermakers. Emily doesn’t have to grow it herself or find a willing Peruvian farmer to ship her bagfuls, and she doesn’t have to cook the raw strands to break them down. She orders sheets of prepared, unbleached fibre: add water, stir, and, presto, she has pulp.
Both sides of the deckle box are filled with the milky abacá. She works quickly now, drizzling the green lily-fibre into the abacá “stuff,” drawing green swirls into the abacá with her fingers.
“Now for the fun part,” she says. She grasps the side of each plastic liner and, like a magician with a tablecloth, whips them out from under the liquid. “Ta-da!”
Suddenly, liquid is gushing out the screen at the bottom of the box, which isn’t sitting quite level. One side is draining faster than the other. Emily rushes to prop it up.
“I met a boy,” she says, her eye fixed on the gushing fluid, which is now draining evenly. “My brain’s a bit of a mess.”
And her heart is on the wrong side of her body. She told me that the day we met.
As the runoff drains, she swishes the box gently, urging the fibre to interlock. When the last of the liquid has drained away, she unhinges the bottom of the box. A thick, familiar-looking wad lies limp on the screen. Soaked Kleenex.
“Everything that happens from this point on is recorded in the paper,” she says. I look past her to the handwritten sign on the wall. No Glitter! She follows my gaze. “Glitter is the STD of the craft world,” she says.
She lifts the screen to the other end of the table, where squares cut from old blankets are stacked. Earlier this morning she soaked them and squeezed out the water. Now she upends the screen, and, in one deft flick, the gooey sheet of paper is released onto the wool.
“It’s called couching,” she says, pronouncing it “kooching,” as in smooching. It comes from the French couche, which means a lot of things, from diaper to social strata. In this studio, it means to lay the paper down.
“After my last relationship broke up, I couldn’t make paper,” she says. “It just wouldn’t couche.”
I’m delighted by the language. “Tell me more.”
“Well, the other way of making paper is to have a vat of hydrated fibre and dip your screen into it. When you pull the screen up, you smack it against the water to release the sheet. That’s called kissing off.
“He plays the ukulele,” she says wistfully. “How good is that? Last night he played ‘When We’re Dancing.’”
She hums the tune as she sets up the paper press, which will exert 60,000 pounds of pressure on every square inch of the newly made page. Because the pages are relatively small, they will be unforgiving, prone to distortion. She stacks wooden pallets inside the press, lays on the blanket, the sheet of paper, another blanket, and more palettes, taking time to make sure the registration is perfect. Then she flips the switch, and the paper press grinds down.
Traditionally, the wool blankets sandwiching the fresh paper are called felts. The texture of the felts has a lot to do with the appearance of the paper. In the early days of papermaking, the felts were often non-woven; the interlocked hairs gave the paper a distinctive “chicken skin” texture. You can still see the impression of woven felts in the surface texture of contemporary hand-made paper, although the pressing diminishes the effect.
Our freshly made paper gets two pressings, the first one five minutes and another, fifteen minutes. The sheet she lifts from between the blankets looks like paper now, limp paper on a very humid summer’s day, but recognizable nonetheless. She bends close to scrutinize what she has made.
“See that?” She points to an almost imperceptible indentation, a thin area surrounded by an infinitesimally thicker ridge. “That’s called a papermaker’s tear.”
I imagine her crying onto the sheets, her heart broken by her new beau.
It is hard to think of this as an imperfection. There are dips and clumps, knots and swirling fibres, as if the paper itself is supple, complex, alive.
She places the two freshly made sheets gently between blotter paper and triple-walled cardboard with a weight on top so the pages won’t shrink, then arranges a fan to blow over them for twenty-four hours until they are dry.
It has taken an hour to make one pair of matching endpapers for the front and back of one copy of my book. Hugh will print 300 copies of The Paradise Project. The prospect of another 299 hours of work doesn’t seem to daunt Emily.
“After I make a hundred or so of these, I’ll figure out some tricks. And my boyfriend says he’ll help. Isn’t that sweet?”
THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS THROUGHOUT THE AIR
Paper is not forever: it can be burned, cut, torn, crumpled, lost; it can rot, discolour, disintegrate; be eaten away by mice and mould. Even so, it is more enduring than what we think or what we say. It has the strength to carry words across vast landscapes, from one time to another, from one person to hundreds, thousands, even millions.
In 1815, John Adams, the second president of the United States, wrote to his grandsons as they were preparing to cross the Atlantic to join their parents: “Without a minute Diary, your Travels will be no better than the flight of Birds throughout the Air. What you write, preserve. I have burned Bushells of my Silly notes, in fits of Impatience and humiliation, which I would now give anything to recover.”
I received my first diary as a going-away gift when I was seven, on my way to Brazil with my family. I wrote in
it daily until I was a young woman, and I’ve kept one ever since, although never consistently enough. When I visited Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul in Coyoacán, I was filled with guilt and longing at the sight of her rows of boxed diaries bulging with clippings and sketches and her impressions of what seemed like every moment of her life.
Leonardo da Vinci, one of the world’s great diarists, left 13,000 pages of notes containing his observations, speculations, plans, and fantasies. Paper had just arrived in Italy 200 years before he was born in 1452. What if there had been no paper? Would he have scratched his ideas in the sand, to be washed away in a storm? Painted them on a wall? He could have used parchment, but that medium was expensive and relatively scarce, the purview of monks. The supply of paper must have been limited, too, yet Leonardo didn’t stint. Of his finished works, only some fifteen paintings and a few sculptures survive: his reputation rests not on these so much as on the enormous body of sketches and notes for his precocious inventions, all recorded for the future on paper.
Beethoven’s compositions were captured and preserved on paper, too, written in his distinctive, erratic hand. It is estimated that if all of Beethoven’s works were written out in musical notation, they would fill 8,000 pages. Thomas Edison’s notes, including his sketch for the first phonograph, run to over five million pages. Canadian novelist Robertson Davies kept a diary all his life; it took his daughter fifteen years to transcribe the over three million words into digital files. Literature and science, music and visual art, even dance choreographies are all notated on paper, giving us the closest thing we have to a glimpse inside the creative mind.
And then there is Joe Blades, the poet in Atlantic Canada who builds amazing books that might be called diaries—splayed objets d’art whose every page is pasted with ephemera. These are books that never close, gaping bindings of pages that, taken together, offer a snapshot of a culture at this moment, and this, and this.
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