role of cellulose in the papermaking process while standing in the snow in Portage, Wisconsin, about eleven miles as the crow flies from where Aldo Leopold found the driftwood discussed in the Introduction. I was using a canoe paddle to stir a cauldron in which Robert Possehl was boiling down a herbaceous plant known locally as Lady’s Mantle—identified in Renaissance herbals by the same name or, alternately, “great Sanicle” or “Lyons Foot.”44 We were cooking plants, not retting rags, but our object was the same. “Cellulose is what paper is made from,” Possehl said, and the process of cooking is one way to reduce the plant to pure cellulose. I relate this story, anecdotal as it is, in an attempt to properly cite the sources from which I have borrowed insights. This is a book that could not have been written well by relying solely on other books; rather, it relies on the generosity and insight of scholars and artisans, many of whom, like Possehl, have not published the unique insights they have gained from decades of research and experimentation. Working, however, with someone who excels at making paper directly from plants, I began to understand how the need for more “cheap and reliable” sources of cellulose affected the history of the book in the first place.
Cheap cellulose would be cellulose that is both abundant and easily extractable. All plants contain cellulose, but in varying amounts. For instance, cellulose makes up “about 90 percent of cotton and about 50 percent of wood.”45 Fiber length matters, too. Flax has about 10 percent less cellulose than cotton, but “its fiber was longer and stronger, and its fiber wall was straighter and thicker.”46 In rag form, plant fibers came to papermakers pre-processed: the labor required to convert the plants into textiles had already been done. The labor of further breaking down the fibers through use (as clothing or ship sails, for example) processed the plant fibers even more. So no matter what the plant fiber, much less labor was required to pulp and make paper from linen rags or ship sails than directly from flax and hemp plants. We might visualize the rag shortage crisis as a triangle where the simplest solution would be to cut out the textile phase and make paper directly from plants (see Figure 4). Thus we see so many lists of experimental plants in the history of paper, and so many years passing without a viable paper product. Then Matthias Koops, an immigrant to England at the end of the eighteenth century, claimed the problem of scarce, expensive, imported rags could be solved with a readily available, cheap, local raw material: oat and wheat straw.
Substances Conveying Ideas
In autumn of 1800, an odd book printed on coarse yellow paper began circulating in London: Historical Account of the Substances Which Have Been Used to Describe Events, and to Convey Ideas, From the Earliest Date, to the Invention of Paper by Matthias Koops (see Figure 5). The title page advertised its contents as a history of media told as a history of raw materials from which media were made, a history not of great books and big human ideas, but of nonhuman “Substances” used “to Describe Events, and to Convey Ideas.” The title page also advertised its own material history: “Printed on the First Useful Paper Manufactured Soley [sic] from Straw.”47 The vivid yellow hue of the paper is heavily flecked with organic matter. In archival libraries, under direct light, the paper can take on a shimmering quality as brownish flecks spark into gold flashes that appear and disappear as the pages are turned. The pages are rough to the touch, and page thickness is uneven throughout. The author’s claim that the paper is made only from straw is grander than it might sound, and it comes from someone who had a history of making grand claims that did not always prove true. And yet, more than two hundred years later, the paper used in the 1800 first edition and in the expanded 1801 second edition is consistently pliable and strong across numerous copies held in multiple locations.48 Koops acknowledges in Substances that his innovation was part of a conversation that had been happening in Europe for nearly a century among figures like Carl Linnaeus, René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, Jacob Christian Schäffer, and a dozen other “scientific men” who had recorded (on rag paper) their “ideas on substitutes for paper-materials.”49 Réaumur, observing wasps, realized that paper could be made from wood as early as 1719. Schäffer was making paper from wood and straw (as well as cattails, wasps’ nests, hops, moss, and cabbage stalks, among others) in the 1760s.50 “It is surprizing,” writes Koops, “that the observations of [these] authors … should not have been earlier attended to by … intelligent paper-makers, who had the road thus opened to them for their investigation.”51 Up to this point in the book, Koops has made the point that over and over throughout recorded history, human ingenuity confronts a scarcity of nonhuman materials, always with the same outcome: an abundant substance is made into a recording surface that supersedes what came before it. Koops relies on the authority of scientists to argue that rag paper is ready to be superseded: “These authors have stated, that as cotton, flax, and hemp, are the origin of paper and rags, other vegetables of a tender and pliable nature might probably be converted into mucilaginous pulp, and adopted in the manufacture of Paper; and farther, that those vegetables that are of a brittle and harsh nature, but which can be obtained in large quantities and at moderate prices, might by art and perseverance be made tender, without destroying that quality which is necessary to be retained in paper-stuff.”52 Koops set out to make paper from straw not because he believed he could make better, whiter, more beautiful paper from that substance, but because he believed he could make perfectly serviceable paper from straw that was also, though he would not have used the phrase, ecologically sustainable.
FIGURE 4. “Plants to Rags to Paper,” Joshua Calhoun.
FIGURE 5. Title page from Matthias Koops, Historical Account of the Substances Which Have Been Used to Describe Events, and to Convey Ideas, From the Earliest Date, to the Invention of Paper (1800), printed on straw paper. Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Substances is perhaps the most stunning conjunction of form and content that I have held: a book about the history of books printed on mass-producible paper made by replacing scarce, imported rag fibers with locally grown, abundant oat and wheat straw. Koops’s volume introduces itself as a history and a future of the book, and it outlines ways of thinking about book history that upend the most popular ways we have schematized the field of study. Substances is reference book and rare book, information bank and artifact. My home institution’s Special Collections owns two copies: one is in the vault alongside rare books, and the other is in the open reference stacks in the Special Collections library right alongside other modern books on the history of papermaking. The Library of Congress Subject Heading (LCSH) “Papermaking—History” and “Writing materials and instruments” groups Substances with indispensable reference works on paper that I have already cited in this chapter, such as Dard Hunter’s Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft (1947) and Therese Weber’s The Language of Paper: A History of 2000 Years (2007). The paper in Koops is lousy by comparison to the paper in many of the fifteenth-and sixteenth-century holdings, but compared to its neighbors on the reference shelf in Madison, the paper is beautiful, sturdy, and resilient.
Koops’s volume, with its titular emphasis on substances (not substrates), with its odd, coarse, yellow pages, inspires a different kind of story about the history of books and especially paper. Substances refuses to be a transparent medium made of limitless raw materials. On pages visibly made from straw, Koops narrates how various raw materials (trees, stones, metals, wax, bark, leaves, papyrus, skins) have been used historically “to preserve the remembrance of important events.”53 It is a history of things used to convey history. Negotiation among humans and nonhumans is at the heart of Koops’s story; the plant sources never drop from view or fade into the background. Because Koops writes in the midst of serious material scarcity, because the stuff of paper cannot be assumed as it so often is in book history narratives, because Koops himself has a stake
