But the question remains: why are scientists working so hard to make plastic screens exactly like paper? Can’t we have both—eat our cake and pie, too? Paper is lovely to touch; screens are workhorses at scrolling and searching and ferrying volumes across oceans and continents.
I want both.
I have walls of books and stacks of diaries and reams of scribbled-over pages. I also love Atavist publishing and storytelling platform, which brings me long news stories with embedded interactive graphics, maps, timelines, animations, and soundtracks. And I am excited by each new installment of interactive fiction from Kate Pullinger and her digital-wizard collaborators, a literary experience that could not possibly happen on paper. The personal, contemplative space created by reading silently can open up around an iPad just as easily as around a paper book. Paper and pixels both are tools, substrates, display technologies: how well they work for us depends on how we use them.
Why is it that we assume each new thing condemns what went before as obsolete? We know that’s not true. We can read a book, stream a Netflix movie, then listen to the radio as we drive to the opera, read a précis of the narrative on our iPad as we wait for the performance to begin.
We can have it all.
KEEPER OF THE WORDS
“Salad paper,” Hugh says by way of greeting as I enter his print shop one bright August morning. He shoves a sheet of pale paper at me.
I can always tell when Hugh has something up his sleeve. He bounces around me like a leprechaun. “Salad paper. Perfect for our paradise project, don’t you think?” He winks.
I run my hand over the sheet. It feels as thick as a communion wafer, but more appealing. A fine cream biscuit.
“Is it handmade?” I ask.
“Well, well, well now. Let me tell you. It is, in a way. It’s from Saint-Armand.”
Saint-Armand is a Montreal papermaker known for its fine handmade and Fourdrinier papers. Handmade sheets are produced one at a time, much the same as the process I saw at Emily’s, although on a larger scale. Screens are dipped in a vat of stuff, the water is drained off, and the paper is pressed and dried in sheets that have four deckle edges and no grain, the fibres knitting together randomly. With Fourdrinier papers, the process is mechanized: a continuous sheet of paper is formed on an endless woven wire cloth that holds the paper fibres on top while the water drains out below. The paper is pressed and dries as it moves over forty feet of heated rollers, then it is wound onto spools and cut into thirty-inch lengths. The process by its nature aligns the fibres, so that the paper has grain in the long direction, which means it can be torn neatly. Sheets cut from a spool of Fourdrinier paper have two deckle edges and two straight edges from the cuts.
David Carruthers founded the Saint-Armand paper mill in 1979. That same year, Hugh met David at one of the first Grimsby Wayzgoose book fairs.
“What’s a wayzgoose?” I ask. My ignorance is legion.
“When an apprentice printer became a journeyman about to start out on his own,” Hugh explains, “the proprietor of the print shop would throw a going-away goose dinner. After a while, this evolved into an annual picnic for all the staff around the end of August. Saint Bartholomew’s Day, I think it was. That day marked the end of summer and the start of working by candlelight. Can you imagine that? Printing by candlelight! And we think we have it hard. They coined the word ‘wayzgoose’ to describe the dinner, shortened from ‘going-away goose,’ I suppose. Apparently they thought it sounded better with a z stuck in the middle. After a while, any party for the printers at a print shop or a newspaper was called a wayzgoose.”
(According to my etymological dictionary, the derivation of the term is in doubt. It could also be a misspelling of wasegoose, from wase, which is sheaf in Middle English, indicating a harvest goose, like the stubble-goose Chaucer mentions in “The Cook’s Prologue.” More likely, my dictionary says, the word comes from the early modern Dutch weghuis or way house, which refers to an inn and also a banquet. Apparently, English printers often apprenticed in the Low Countries and brought printing terminology back with them.)
Some individual presses still throw an annual wayzgoose to celebrate their work and workers: Coach House Books in Toronto has been doing so since 1965. In 1979, a small gathering of friends in the bookmaking arts—letterpress printers, printmakers, papermakers, and hand bookbinders—decided to get together to talk books and paper and printing, and to exhibit their wares. They called it Wayzgoose, after that long printing tradition, and the annual gathering has been growing steadily ever since. Held each year on the last Saturday in April in Grimsby, Ontario, it now attracts over fifty artisans and more than 2,000 visitors.
“We were essentially in it for the kicks,” Hugh laughs. “We had to be. We didn’t sell enough to pay for the beer we drank afterwards.”
This year, I make the trek to Wayzgoose. Hugh’s heart is acting up—that’s the way he puts it—and he’s on the list for a new valve, borrowed from a pig. His booth is womanned by a young book artist who has fallen under the sway of Hugh, another acolyte who feels ink stirring in her veins. Dozens of book artists are set up in the hallway of the Grimsby Public Library, their books arranged on tables in front of them. Not stiff towers of the sort of books found in a bookstore: these are softly covered, thick-paged, gorgeous books filled with pages with ragged edges that reverent readers delicately lift and turn in their hands as if the book were a rare work of art, which each one clearly is.
“David and I always see each other at Wayzgoose. We both have a sense of humour. You need one of those to cope with such desperate enterprises as making paper and publishing books.”
Just as ink is in Hugh’s blood, paper—or maybe pulp—is in David’s. His grandfather, George Carruthers, owned a large paper mill and wrote a book, Papermaking, that traced the history of papermaking in Canada up to 1905. David’s father was a paper salesman with the family firm. David himself started out working at the Pulp & Paper Association of Canada, but his knowledge of the paper trade convinced him to set up a handmade paper mill “with a dash of technology,” as he puts it.
The early years were tough. His nascent mill was plagued with floods, machinery failures, and unhappy neighbours. But he persevered, selling his handmade paper to art suppliers in Canada, the United States, and abroad.
In 1992, David had the chance to buy a thousand-pound Hollander beater from Massachusetts. His paper was and still is made primarily from rags, mostly cotton off-cuts from local clothing manufacturers, but it can also be made from linen, flax straw, jute, sisal—any kind of organic fabric. His shop floor in an old industrial and rapidly gentrifying suburb of Montreal is littered with huge bags of cuttings from what David calls “the bed-sheet ladies” and “the long-underwear guys.” A machine chops the fabric to uniform shreds that are pulped in the giant beater: 500 pounds of chopped rag to 20,000 litres of water. Nothing else is added: no chemicals, no bleach. White paper is made from white underwear offcuts, blue from blue denim.
At the same time as he acquired the 1903 Hollander, David bought a Fourdrinier papermaking machine. The Fourdrinier was invented in 1799 in France, at the height of the French Revolution. It was financed (not invented) by the Fourdrinier brothers, who lost their shirts in the venture but had their name attached forever to the first break-through in papermaking since Cai Lun set out his instructions in 105 CE.
The Fourdrinier revolutionized papermaking and put it at the very cutting edge of the Industrial Revolution, so much so that the proper name has now become an adjective. When David set up his rescued Hollander and his 1947 Fourdrinier, no one in Canada was making handmade paper on a large scale. His Fourdrinier was probably the only such machine set up since the 1920s. He was bucking a trend.
“Paper is life’s hard copy,” David says. His rumbling, sloshy basement in Quebec produces the only fine art rag paper in Canada, one of a handful of such papermakers left in the wo
rld. “Paper has to survive.”
© HULTON ARCHIVE
Saint-Armand refers to its Fourdrinier papers as Canal paper (named after the Lachine Canal, near where David finally settled his factory). The company sells twenty different grades of Canal papers, made from cotton, sisal, linen, or flax straw. If the order is big enough, David can mix a customized pulp. He has made patterned papers with spots and stripes, papers scattered with coffee beans, vine leaves, apple leaves, die-cut letters, and photocopied images. He’s made paper that imitates marble, bark, animal skin, and even an old wooden door.
Hugh wants Canal paper for The Paradise Project. He has designed the book to be fifty-seven pages long, each page measuring about five by eleven inches. Each sheet of Canal paper is roughly twenty-two by thirty, which means that Hugh can get twelve Paradise Project pages out of a sheet. For 300 books, he’ll need roughly 1,500 sheets. Not a big order by commercial papermaking standards.
“Of course, depending on the fibres, the sheets are going to shrink a bit. You might end up with a sheet that is twenty-one inches after it dries. The sheets will vary in thickness, too, depending on where in the roll they are cut from,” Hugh explains. He winks. “Nothing is ever as straightforward as it seems.”
That thought tires me, but it fires Hugh up. “The first sheets off the batch will be slightly thicker because there will be more fibre in the same volume of water, and this can affect the printing impression. A man on a galloping horse wouldn’t notice, but it can be a problem to an anal person like me.”
If Hugh sometimes comes across as a fanatic, he isn’t a patch on Dard Hunter.
From 1922 to 1950, Hunter produced eight limited-edition books, handmade in a way that Hugh only dreams of. Not only did Hunter make his own paper, he bought a property with a running stream so he could produce the power to run the pulping stampers. His goal was to produce a printed book that was, down to the very last detail, made entirely by himself. He accomplished that eight exquisite times. One of those books, which he both wrote and printed—Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft—was in part responsible for the post–Second World War revival of hand papermaking and handprinting in the United States.
Hugh is prodding me with the Salad paper.
“It’s made from cotton fibre and it is acid-free,” he says. “It will last forever—or 500 years, whichever comes first—or we will give you your money back.”
Hugh is watching me like a five-year-old with a secret.
“Don’t you want to know why it’s called Salad paper?” he says finally, taking the sheet out of my hands.
I play along. “Sure. Why is it called Salad paper?”
“Well. David had a call from a printmaker in New York. The man was very insistent. He wanted to know if the paper David was selling him was good for ‘salad’ prints.”
Hugh is chuckling wildly to himself. I can’t imagine where this is going.
“The man was from Brooklyn. It took a while, but eventually David realized that the printmaker was saying ‘solid’ prints.” Hugh does a very bad imitation of a nasally, wide-mouthed New York City accent: “Solid. Salad. Get it?”
I laugh. Hugh is irresistible. He always makes me laugh.
“So David named it Salad paper. He figured it would be a big seller among the greengrocers.”
THE SOUND OF SILENCE
Paper rustles. It snaps. It swishes. It riffles, slides, and flumps. If someone asked, I would say this is the sound of books, but I’d be wrong. It’s the sound that paper makes.
Imagine a library completely stripped of paper books. We’re almost there: my local library is alive now with the chirp of keys, the click of mice, the whoosh of emailed words sucked up into cyberspace. Mechanical sounds. But go to the shelves (yes, there are still public shelves for browsing) and leaf through a book. Close your eyes. Listen.
The manufacturers of digital readers must be aware of how much we love the sound of paper because most of them have taken pains to add sound cues that simulate the turning of a page. They’ve tried to mimic the physical turning, too, even though with an ereader there is no page to turn, just a soundless scrolling of text and image.
The whoosh of a turning page on an ereader is a sop. It’s like the gear shift in my Toyota Prius, which serves no purpose other than to reassure me that what I am driving is a car in the way I still understand the word “car,” as a machine with an internal combustion engine. I press a button to start the car and I could just as easily press buttons to shift from Park to Reverse, but Toyota gives me a gear-shift knob instead, to create the illusion that I am personally putting the car through its paces.
I suspect that the future in which we give up this pretense is not too far away. The images on our ereaders will scroll silently one to the next. No faux page lifting at the bottom right-hand corner. No surrogate sound of rustling paper. No attempt whatsoever to reproduce the visceral sensations of reading on paper.
In 2006, I was Writer in Residence at Green College, University of British Columbia. Green is a multidisciplinary graduate student college modelled on Green College, Oxford, and endowed by the Texas Instrument philanthropist Cecil Green. My only job, apart from writing a novel, was to engage in dinner conversation with the residents, one of whom was doing post-doc research on ereader screens, although the devices weren’t called that at the time. They hadn’t been around long enough to warrant a generic name.
“We have to make the reading experience onscreen as much like reading on paper as possible,” he said, and even then I wondered why. Did papermakers in the fourteenth century think that way, too? Did they try to make sheets of paper look as much like parchment as possible?
The curse of the innovator: to make the strange familiar.
Will historians of the future look back with awe at the first ereader screens, touch them as reverently as paper historians touch the ancient fibrous relics found in Chinese caves? Will they wonder where the screen was made and by whom? Or will they shake it vigorously, bash it against a tree, puzzled by what this inert rectangle of plastic was meant to do.
Before I met Hugh, I might have said I had no opinions about paper, but it seems that I do. I buy my notebooks in Mexico because I like the tissue-thinness of the paper in the 10-peso scribblers, the slightly waxy coating that speeds my pen along. I don’t care for paper with “tooth.” And I don’t like paper that thinks it’s a blotter, spreading my ink like a bruise.
“Paper” didn’t appear as a word in the English language until around 1350, during the last days of the Dark Ages, at the height of the bubonic plague. The word derives from papyrus and comes ultimately from the Egyptians who made paper from that genus of plant. “Page” comes from the Latin pagina, a strip of papyrus fastened to another strip to create a scroll. “Page,” meaning a sheet of paper, came into English some 200 years after the word “paper.” In 1993, “home page” was coined, and now page refers not only to a physical sheet of paper but to a block of information that fills the screen at a single Internet URL.
Language is in transition, and so are we.
I write on paper. I write onscreen. I like writing on paper better, or I used to. I have to recalibrate that phrase daily as my habits change. The drag of paper irks me when words are clamouring to stream out. Words onscreen come with a ready-made gloss, the margins automatically justified so that the page looks like it’s part of a book long before the words have any right to call themselves anything but a raw heap of alphabet.
In the first years of settlement on this continent, paper was such a precious commodity that people wrote over the sheet twice, once in one direction, once in another, a crosshatch of stories. I’ve read diaries by pioneers and letters from settlers that were almost illegible, the words were so entangled. In my novel The Holding, Alyson, a back-to-the-land gardener, finds an old cookbook in a collapsed log cabin, the last pages written in ex
actly that way:
at the end, a few sheets closely written in cursive script, the paper written over twice, side to side, then top to bottom, so that the sentences seemed woven together, and she knelt there by the logs, the wind worrying at the pages as she tried to tease the phrases apart, until she found an opening and tracing her finger along the lines, she came at last to the beginning—
Not only did early settlers write crosswise, sometimes circling the margins, too, but the penmanship itself was cramped, letters jammed up against each other, the ascenders and descenders held under tight rein. I can imagine the writer, hunched into herself, the pen held rigid, as frugal with her words as with her paper.
There is no such parsimony now. Digital screens make us garrulous, no paper to consider, just endless letters jostled into words and strung together in sentences (or not), our posture loose, our mouths flapping, fingers flying, an endless spew.
Pixel or paper: is one better than the other, more lasting, more real? Or in the end, are both as desperately inadequate as Franz Kafka bemoans in his letter to his beloved Felice:
“May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.”
A LASTING IMPRESSION
The page that Hugh hands me is a material object. It does not yet hold any information except the story of its own history and making. It rustles slightly in my hand. I look at it head-on, as I might look at a painting. Then I hold it up to the light, as Emily taught me to do, to look for variations in opacity and how the paper fibres are dispersed. This is the look-through. Then I hold it at a raking angle to the light—the look-down—to check the texture on the surface caused by the felts, the moulds, the fibres. I look for the papermaker’s tears.
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