had been patented by another Englishman, John Dickinson, in 1809, and on 29 November 1814 The Times became the first newspaper printed on such a machine. In 1820 Thomas Bonsor Crompton was granted a patent for drying cylinders, which meant paper no longer had to be hung to dry. In 1824 John Dickinson was granted another patent – he was, with Bryan Donkin, one of the great paper pioneers – this time for a machine that pasted paper together to form a kind of cardboard. In 1825 the first ‘dandy roll’ was developed, so-called because on seeing it in action workers at the mills apparently exclaimed ‘What a dandy!’ It was used to press watermarks into machine-made paper. A Fourdrinier machine – built by Donkin in England – was set up in America in 1827. In 1830 bleach was introduced into the process of turning rags into paper. In 1840 Friedrich Gottlob Keller, a weaver and reed-binder in Saxony, patented a wood-grinding machine, making mass paper production possible. Christmas cards, photographs, adhesive postage stamps and paper bags all began to be produced during the 1840s and 1850s, and by 1900 there were machine-made cigarette papers, tracing papers, cups, plates, collars, cuffs, napkins, tissues and almost every other imaginable paper product. With the first commercial production of corrugated cardboard boxes around the turn of the century – making it possible for paper safely to send itself to itself by itself – the Age of Paper had reached its zenith.
Watermarks: the equivalent of an artisan’s trade-mark
It all began in China, of course, many years ago, and it continues in China still, where the political, economic and cultural significance of paper can’t be overestimated: traditional prayers are still written on paper and burned; traditional paper kites are still flown; and traditional cut paper is still used to decorate shrines. More importantly, the Chinese paper industry is now booming and grinding in the same way it boomed in Europe and America in the nineteenth century, with a consolidation of production into large-scale mills and a move away from the use of recycled material towards the use of wood pulp (largely imported from Russia) to feed the country’s burgeoning appetite for brand spanking new Western-style packaged consumer goods, mail-order catalogues, newspapers, magazines and paper money. It’s possible, as some scholars have suggested, that paper was not originally a Chinese invention, and that the Khanzadas people, from Tizara in the Alwar district of Rajasthan in India, first made it from cellulose fibres sometime in the third century BC. Or maybe the Aztecs. Or the Mayans. It’s also possible that the Chinese did not invent printing, gunpowder and the compass. But even if they didn’t invent them, they may as well have done: they did invent banknotes, and cannonballs, and manned flight with kites, and numerous astronomical instruments; whether or not they got there first with the four great inventions, they were certainly early adopters. In August 2006 at Dunhuang, in the Gansu province of north-western China, an important town on the ancient Silk Road and the site of numerous archaeological discoveries over the past hundred years, flax paper was discovered that dates back to the Western Han Dynasty (202 BC– 220 AD), meaning that paper may have been in use at least two hundred years before the oft-cited date of 105 AD, when T’sai Lun, the Shang Fang Si, the officer in charge of the Emperor’s weapons and instruments, is said to have first reported its invention.
From Dunhuang it is possible to chart the vast westward drift of paper, like a slow-moving landslide. Plotted by significant sites of paper production, and going from right to left, the paper trail flows majestically over about a five-hundred-year period, first from China to Samarkand, and then to north Africa (Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, Fes), before moving on to Europe between the tenth and twelfth centuries (Xativa, Fabriano, Troyes, Nuremberg, Krakow, Moscow). By the fifteenth century pulp tech had even washed up in England: John Tate established the first paper mill in Britain, in Hertfordshire, in 1495. Legend has it – a legend derived from an old Arabic manuscript, Roots of Trades and Kingdoms – that papermaking began its long journey to the west at a battle in AD 751 at the River Talas (Tharaz/Taraz), about five hundred miles east of Samarkand, at which Arab armies, victorious over the Chinese, seized some papermakers as prisoners, who promised to reveal the secrets of papermaking in exchange for their freedom.
True or not, by the end of the eighth century the Sogdian Arabs had certainly taken to papermaking, and paper had taken to them: they had become, like us, paper people. The first paper factory opened in Baghdad in 793–94, and under the Abbasid caliphate, the great Islamic Golden Age, the city became a centre of learning with its own unique paper market, consisting of shops and stalls, fueling and fulfilling the great demand for paper by the city’s artists, philosophers and scientists. By the ninth century paper was being produced in Damascus, in Hama, and in Tripoli, and by the end of the tenth century the skills and knowledge of papermaking, carried by Muslim scribes and texts, had spread through Tunisia, Mauritania and Morocco, arriving in Spain around 950 AD. The production and manufacture of paper, if not its actual invention, might therefore be said to be one of Islam’s many gifts to the West (the word ‘ream’, as the great scholar of Islamic papermaking, Jonathan Bloom, points out, derives from the Arabic word for ‘bundle’). Though it was not a gift that was always warmly received, even by the most foresighted and discerning: in 1221 the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, bald and brilliant, known as the stupor mundi, the wonder of the world, issued a decree declaring that all documents written on paper were invalid; they would not last; they were ephemeral. Some scholars have speculated that the stupor mundi may have been under pressure from sheep and cattle breeders who were fearful of losing the market for parchment. Or maybe Frederick was just not so stupor after all. Either way, the decree came too late: paper was the future. Parchment was yesterday’s news.
So from China to the Arab world, and through the Byzantine Empire into Christian Europe, paper made its slow procession – and slow precisely because hand papermaking was a slow process. It was also cold, hard work: for the vatman, who dipped the mould into the vat, and lifted it out, allowing the water to drain; for the coucher, who removed the wet sheet from the mould and laid it on felt; and for the layman, who stacked and pressed the sheets and hung them to dry, sheet after sheet after endless weary sheet. And this is not to mention all the other equally backbreaking and even less glamorous tasks: before the invention by the Dutch of the so-called Hollander beater in the early eighteenth century there was the shredding and beating of the rags for the pulp; and the dipping of the finished sheets in sizing; and the polishing of the pages by hand, or calendering them between rollers; the eternal smoothing out of ridges and wrinkles. Dard Hunter, who knew papermaking from the inside out, and the outside in – as both a scholar and a practitioner of the craft, and as the founder of his own paper mill, and a paper museum, and the author of one-man books, The Etching of Figures (1916) and The Etching of Contemporary Life (1917), for which he made the paper, and designed and cut and cast the typeface, and etched the pictures and wrote the words – believed that papermakers needed unusually robust constitutions because ‘the constant stooping posture, combined with the heat of the paper stock in the vat, caused them to grow old prematurely … at fifty many of these hard-working craftsmen appeared to have reached the allotted threescore years and ten’.
And yet despite all these hardships, traditions of hand papermaking still survive. Gandhi famously demonstrated papermaking at the 1938 Haripura Congress, and ancient methods of Indian papermaking are still maintained in a town called Sanganer, near Jaipur, where all the paper is chemical-free, sun-dried, unbleached and naturally coloured. In Nepal, hand-made lotka paper is still made from the bark of daphne trees. And in Japan there will always be washi. ‘Why is washi so wholesome?’ asks Soetsu Yanagi, co-founder of the Japan Folk Art Society. ‘When we try to figure it out, we cannot help but think it is because nature is paper’s mother and tradition paper’s father.’ And England? In England, the Exotic Paper Company of Chilcompton, Somerset, makes a paper using elephant dung from Woburn Safari Park.
Meanwhile, in the giant paper mills, the machines grind on, the woodchips stewing in their alkali solutions, and the top-secret pulp recipes crying out like addicts at a meth clinic for their chemical additives. A recent Handbook of Toxicology and Ecotoxicology for the Pulp and Paper Industry (2001) lists more than thirty common compounds that are
