overcome austerity and adversity. As readers, we move through many of these bildungsroman-style narratives by turning paper pages, so we know there is a happy, paper-supplied ending. Maybe we even unwrap reams of printing paper emblazoned with arboreal logos so we can print out parts of these stories. Too often, though, the history of papermaking tacitly elides the fact that it took too many innovators far too long to find a suitable substitute for rags.
The Transformation of a Plant
In Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Order, 1450–1830, David McKitterick writes, “The real issues in papermaking lay in the discovery and development of raw materials to meet a growing demand from the printing industry. From the mid-[eighteenth]century onwards—and with mounting urgency as curiosity was fed by need—wood, straw, nettles and other vegetable matter were subjects of experiment and of competition, in a search for a material that was plentiful, cheap and reliable.”27 True as the observation is, it belies an intriguing conundrum: Which was the priority—“urgency” and “need” or vegetable matter that was both “cheap and reliable”? Historically, papermaking technology has been driven not as much by demand for paper as by demand for raw materials that could be obtained cheaply. The history of paper production, like the history of oil production, is a history of scarce nonhuman supply pitted against self-assured human demand. When “cheap and reliable” are the standards, especially where a sense of urgency is in play, a sustainable bargain, one that tends to balance supply and demand in a given ecosystem, is unlikely.
According to a well-known poem quoted by Dard Hunter in Papermaking,
RAGS make paper,
PAPER makes money,
MONEY makes banks,
BANKS make loans,
LOANS make beggars,
BEGGARS make
RAGS.28
In these lines, as in Darnton’s Communications Circuit (discussed in the Introduction), cycles of human use within a social economy are imagined as independent from the natural world. But rags do not simply come to be because of defaulted loans. To better understand rag shortage and the search for a suitable—that is, a cheap—plant substitute, we might tell a less anthropocentric narrative that begins well before the rag stage. “Papermaking is the transformation of a plant,” claims papermaker Robert Possehl.29 It is a concise definition that literally grounds the study of papermaking. Walter Hamady notes that “the main ingredient for all natural paper is simply CELLULOSE FIBER. Most living plants are made up of this fiber and, properly prepared, can produce some kind of paper.”30 So we might say:
SEEDS make plants,
PLANTS make cellulose,
CELLULOSE makes textiles,
TEXTILES make rags,
RAGS make paper.
Often, the story of papermaking is a story of solutions, of what happens after the right plant has been “properly prepared,” but here I wish to slow down and emphasize the problems of cellulose extraction because that part of the process can give us a better understanding of paper’s varied ecologies across time and place.31
Cellulose does not often appear in book history scholarship, but it plays a central role in the story of paper’s ecology. Cellulose, by definition, is “an insoluble carbohydrate which is the main structural constituent of the cell walls of plants, and one of the most abundant organic compounds on the earth.”32 Scholars and papermakers alike tend to refer to paper made from straw or linen rag or flax or wood, but those designations might be thought of as shorthand: paper is made from the cellulose present in each of those plants.33 We use the same sort of shorthand when we refer to dietary fiber: we mean, primarily, cellulose, the part of a plant that is not broken down in the digestive tract. Because book history has tended to tell a more or less anthropocentric story about paper, cellulose rarely merits inclusion in the narrative.34 Mark Bland’s A Guide to Early Printed Books and Manuscripts and John Carter and Nicolas Barker’s ABC for Book Collectors cite “cellulose” once each, for example. In both cases, the resilience of cellulose fibers in forming a durable book object is focal: Bland notes that the “cellulose fibres of paper withstand folding,” and Carter and Barker state in their definition for “de-acidification” that “earlier paper made from rags or esparto grass contains pure uncompounded cellulose, and, short of physical assault, has a very long life.”35 Cellulose, in book history, plays an important, but limited and subdued role.
Turning from the scholarship of book history toward that of artisans, conservators, and scientists, we find cellulose to be the real hero of the story of papermaking. It actually does seem that dramatic at times—as if we have all been aware that Clark Kent plays a key role in the Superman narrative without guessing his true identity. In The Complete Book of Papermaking, paper artist Josep Asunción explains that “what we call paper is actually a thin sheet produced from the physical bonding of previously hydrated fibrous materials, mostly cellulose.”36 In the preface to the English edition of Therese Weber’s The Language of Paper, Jonathan M. Bloom defines paper as “technically a mat of cellulose fibers suspended in water, deposited on a screen, and then dried,” and throughout the book, Weber circles back to a dependency on “raw materials … found locally” and on human struggles to extract cellulose from those raw materials.37 She calls attention, for instance, to the repeated failures of European papermakers to make paper directly from plants rather than from rags and claims that when late nineteenth-century researchers “succeeded in extracting wood cellulose by the sulphite or sulphate process, the use of wood fibre became properly practicable for the first time.”38 Richard L. Hills, whose Papermaking in Britain, 1488–1988 focuses on the industry, technology, and science of paper-making, defines “cellulose” as “the basic substance of paper manufacture.”39
Noting the different ways that academic and artisanal narratives are told, and especially the different beginning points of those narratives, I put what I intend to be productive pressure on the underlaps of academic and artisanal expertise, and I do so with the aim of calling attention to productive overlaps between book history and environmental humanities scholarship.40 A key insight into the ecology of paper that arose from thinking with artisans who make paper by hand using historical techniques was the simple but profound realization that careful, lengthy prep work is key to a well-made final product, and perhaps the most important step in this prep work is the process of fiber maceration known as retting. In simple terms, retting is the process of stripping away all but cellulose. Numerous methods were used: papermaker Timothy Barrett writes that “the fermentation methods used by various mills are very likely to have differed as much as the construction and location of the mills themselves.”41 Barrett emphasizes the specialized skill that went into the essential process of retting, likening it to the work of a good winemaker: “Knowing how to ret rags was not unlike knowing how to ferment grape juice to make good wine.” As with wine, Barrett notes, the methods used to ret paper yielded unique final products: “Retting is a crucial reason for the unique look, feel, and handle of many of the best early book papers … second in importance only to the special nature of the old-rag raw material.”42 To make paper by hand, to try to craft even a mediocre replica of the kind of surface book historians encounter by the hundreds and thousands, is to begin to understand that papermaking begins many steps before the vatman dips a mould and deckle into the vat.
In the preface to Papermaking by Hand, Hamady recounts that “a scholar who had written a book on papermaking came to visit one time and when he saw the actual formation of the sheet, loudly exclaimed ‘so that’s how it’s done!’”43
