meant to be instructive: the history of substances used to convey ideas is one of supersession, and so is the future of substances used to convey ideas.
Koops was not the first to try to make paper from straw, and he does not claim to be. His claim, printed on the title page, is that his is the first useful paper made only from straw (with no rags added). By September 1800, the date given at the end of the preface to Substances, Koops had secured two patents related to his work on substitute materials for papermaking: one for extracting ink from printed and written paper, pulping the waste paper, and making new paper (No. 2392, April 28, 1800); and one “for a method of manufacturing paper from straw, hay, thistles, waste, and refuse of hemp and flax, and different kinds of wood and bark” (No. 2433, August 2, 1800).74 His motive for printing Substances appears to have been twofold: to prove the success of his project and to appeal to the Crown to protect his trade secrets from foreign theft. By printing the book on straw paper, Koops demonstrates its viability. In numerous copies I have examined, Koops has signed the preface, perhaps to show that straw makes good writing paper as well (see Figure 6). In the latter pages of Substances, Koops claims that he has manufactured “several thousand reams of perfectly clean and white Paper, since the 1st of May, made from old waste, written, and printed Paper.”75 His next goal is to make “the most perfect Paper from straw and other vegetables.” The paper “these lines are printed upon” is not yet perfected, he claims, but “this specimen leaves no doubt in my mind, that … I shall make straw-paper in as great perfection as that which is now remanufactured from waste-paper.”76 And if the project fails? Koops makes the case that even if straw paper were only good for “pasteboards, packing-paper, and paper-hangings,” it will benefit the nation.77 According to Koops, making paper-hangings from English straw has the potential of flipping an upside-down economic model so that, instead of sending money to the Continent for rags, England would be able to manufacture paper-hangings more cheaply and could then sell paper-hangings at a lower rate to European purchasers. Straw paper, Koops argues, is a win-win proposition that can drastically reduce dependence on foreign supply by substituting locally sourced (or, at least, nationally sourced) raw materials.
FIGURE 6. Koops’s signature at the end of the preface to Substances (1800). Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin–Madison.
At the end of Substances, Koops adds a brief, seven-page (two sheets with seven of eight possible sides printed) appendix, which is posed as if it is an afterthought, but stands out to a reader because the paper on which it is printed is clearly not the same as the paper used for the rest of the book. The sheets are more pale brown than yellow, and they are less coarse. Printed on this paper are these words: “The following lines are printed upon Paper made from Wood alone, the produce of this country, without any intermixture of rags, waste paper, bark, straw, or any other vegetable substance.”78 Koops had figured out the future of papermaking. He had successfully produced and printed on paper made from wood alone, with no additives. And the paper remains intact in all of the editions I have examined.79 Even in 1801, when Koops expanded Substances and printed the main part of some editions on “Paper Re-made from Old Printed and Written Paper” instead of on straw paper, the wood-pulp paper appendix is still present. However, only in the 1800 edition do we find, at the end of the volume, a small ornament that might well be an emblem of Substances as a whole: the image of a gravestone, engraved with the word “FINIS” in front of a chopped-up tree and a setting sun.80 The future of paper, as Koops figured out, was to be found in the harvesting of trees.
Looking backward from 1800, Koops sees how bookmaking brought the world to the cusp of the Industrial Revolution; looking forward, he sees the possibility of establishing the manufacture of paper in England using a substance, straw, that is available in a sustainable, abundant supply. The book itself is addressed to King George III and framed as an appeal about licensing and patents more than as a persuasive work of book history scholarship. And yet it is both. But whatever his talent for understanding the history of paper-making, Koops’s own project failed spectacularly. By 1800, he had secured three patents for papermaking—all three for experimental approaches to replacing rags with more abundant raw materials—and he was working at Neckinger paper mill in Bermondsey. By 1801, Koops had established the Straw Paper Manufactory at Millbank in Westminster, the largest paper mill in England. By October 1804, Koops was bankrupt, and the mill’s equipment was on the auction block, “ending the possibility of England challenging the European paper industry by using more easily available materials for making paper.”81
FIGURE 7. Ornament from the last page of Substances (1800), printed on wood pulp paper. Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Koops’s narrative unsettles the sort of hindsight biases that do not often acknowledge that books are equal parts human ideas and nonhuman materials. The brilliance of Koops’s volume is that it simultaneously demands several kinds of reading, for its pages—the words on them and the paper itself—record a natural history of the book and, especially, of papermaking. When Koops writes about pages made from raw materials, he writes not about substrates, but about substances; not about inevitability, but about potential; not about books or media, but about memorials; not about ecological abundance, but about ecological scarcity. The irony is that Koops ushers papermaking into the industrial age of mass production.82 The coarse yellow pages of Substances, the pale brown pages of its wood-pulp appendix, and the story that Koops tells on those pages mark the end of an epoch of hand papermaking. Within a decade of Substances and of the failure of Koops’s paper mill, papermaking would be revolutionized (and industrialized) with the help of bleach and the perfection of papermaking machines. Raw materials would remain problematic and scarce, but by the late nineteenth century, the papermaking industry shifted westward, across the Atlantic Ocean and across the North American continent, as trees became the cheap and reliable plants that could be transformed into paper.83
The untapped resources of the American West inspired belief in the obviousness of what progress was and in a providential mandate to subdue and have dominion. Reproductions of American Progress were not included in nineteenth-century guidebooks to temper optimism. The story of paper is a similarly complicated narrative that, in many histories of paper, easily veers into encomium. One particularly adulatory history of paper imagines an uncomplicated, machine-driven paper utopia: “In less than half a century, the machines have entirely superseded the diminutive hand-mills which sparsely dotted the country, and gigantic establishments have risen up in their places. Paper-mill villages, and banking institutions even, have grown out of this flourishing branch of industrial art, and we behold with satisfaction and amazement, what has been brought about by the aid of a commodity so insignificant in the eyes of the world as linen and cotton rags.”84 This is the Chronology of the Origin and Progress of Paper and Paper-Making, printed four years after Gast’s American Progress, and a fitting companion to it, for the story of early handmade paper is not pre-industrial, but proto-industrial. It is a story of questionable progress toward cheap raw materials and cheap labor—“cheap at any cost,” to cite Wendell Berry.85
Spinning Wheels
Compared to Taylor’s seventeenth-century poem of praise for hemp and flax and to Thoreau’s paean to the commodities moving across nineteenth-century train tracks and even to Darnton’s far more recent Communications Circuit, Koops offers a striking perspective on the scarcity and abundance of substances used to record ideas. Reading Taylor and Thoreau, one could be forgiven for assuming that raw materials were always there—somewhere. The second half of Taylor’s Praise of Hemp-seed celebrates paper made from hemp and flax rags as a “rich commodity” worthy of excessive
