the globe yields paper, which in turn yields poetic matter about the global importance of paper. Taylor goes on (and on):
No Empire, Kingdome, Region, Prouince, Nation,
No Principality, Shire, nor Corporation:
No country, county, city, hamlet, towne,
But must vse paper, either white or browne.
No Metropolitane, or gratious Primate
No village, pallace, cottage, function, climate,
No age sex, or degree the earth doth beare,
But they must vse this seed to write, or weare.86
Reading Taylor, paper users must have known the story of paper made from plants was not so simple, direct, or domestic as his commendatory lines suggest. Perhaps Renaissance writers and readers knew about the fraught supplies of foreign paper the way we know as a culture, but do not operate as though we believe, that we will not always be able to rely on cheap, foreign fossil fuels. In an imaginary dialogue about the state of the country, printed in London in 1581, one of the interlocutors explains that “there was paper made a while within the realme,” but that the papermaker could not make his paper “as good cheape as it came from beyond the sea.”87 The papermaker referred to was probably John Tate, the first papermaker in England around the end of the fifteenth century, but the complaint is the same made by Matthias Koops, the first straw and wood pulp papermaker in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
When Taylor considers the origins of paper, how a plant like hemp (or flax) cycles through society and then “to paper doth conuert,” he is drawn to think about how human stories and plant stories come to be interwoven:
For when I thinke but how is paper made
Into Philosophy I straight waies wade:
How here, and there, and euery where lies scatter’d,
Old ruind rotten rags, and ropes, all tatter’d.88
Taylor goes on to imagine several specific origin stories in which paper becomes a rhetorical under-text that inflects and in some cases subverts the over-text. A Brownist’s “zealous ruffe,” for instance, might “Be turnd to paper, and a Play writ in’t.”89 But the most famous lines that Taylor records in this poem imprinted into the fibers of plant-based paper are these:
In paper, many a Poet now suruiues
Or else their lines had perish’d with their liues.
Old Chaucer, Gower, and Sir Thomas More,
Sir Philip Sidney, who the Lawrell wore,
Spencer, and Shakespeare did in Art excell,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Forgetfulnesse their workes would ouerrun,
But that in paper they immortally
Do liue in spight of death, and cannot die.90
Taylor’s lines constitute the first posthumous mention of Shakespeare’s name in print.91 As Adam Hooks notes, Taylor gives precedence to “the material and economic context”: Shakespeare defies death “because individual copies of his plays and poems were printed, bought, and sold.”92 Shakespeare, like the other poets listed, survives “in paper”—a claim that subtly plays with Shakespeare’s own observation in Sonnet 15 that “men as plants increase.”93 As I discuss in the next chapter, the connection between poet and plant is not chiefly metaphorical but material, and it is recognizable in the handmade pages of early books in the botanical form of visible flecks of plant matter.
Thoreau’s paper, by comparison, appears dull. Though still composed of rags, it is “wove” paper made by machine, and the pages of the journals he kept while at Walden Pond tend toward homogeneity.94 Mark Bland writes that “modern paper”—with which Thoreau’s paper shares many visual characteristics even though the nature of his pages shares more ecological characteristics with Taylor’s and with Shakespeare’s paper—“is mass produced and production methods seek to minimise differences … in effect, the paper either effaces or standardises the history within it.”95 At the Morgan Library, where I looked into the pages of some of Thoreau’s journals along with curator and paper historian John Bidwell, I became especially aware of how much can be effaced in the homogeneity of modern paper. I was struggling to read Thoreau’s terrifically scribbled handwriting and defaulted to the most basic of paleographical skills: striving to positively identify unique letterforms as a basis for decoding full words. On the page shown in Figure 8, one letterform immediately stood out toward the middle, left margin, a capital letter that had to be a Z. And suddenly, out of the mire of Thoreau’s scrawling on recycled plant-fiber rags, Zilpah White emerged. Zilpah White, the former slave whose Loyalist master abandoned her to fate when he fled the country in 1775.96
FIGURE 8. Page from Henry David Thoreau’s journal while at Walden Pond. MA 1302.7. Thoreau, Henry David, 1817–1862. Journal: autograph manuscript: Walden [Concord], [1845 July–Winter 1845/1846], p. [87] “Over eastward of my bean field….” Reproduced by permission of the Morgan Library and Museum.
White had gone to Walden Woods not to suck the marrow out of life, but to survive independently, and she did so with a flax wheel. In Black Walden: Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord, Elise Lemire explains that White’s former masters had a “spinning garret” for “spinning flax into the linen fibers that were then woven into fine table linens and other markers of wealth and gentility.”97 Thoreau, telling White’s story decades after her death, writes that “she spun linen for the townsfolk, making the Walden Woods ring with her shrill singing.”98 Zilpah White’s story is inextricably connected with the story I am telling about paper, and the role she played in the history of plants as rags as paper is largely hidden from view. “When slavery ended,” writes Lemire, “at least some former slave women were given one of their master’s spinning wheels as a means of providing for themselves.”99 It was a short-term solution, however, for the work these women could do on small spinning wheels would soon be overwhelmed by industrial factories that could make linen cloth more quickly and more reliably and sell it more cheaply.100
Paper has a serendipitous and romantic and compelling and complex backstory, one that can begin to seem so obvious in hindsight, one that marches across the pages of history like Columbia across the bountiful landscape of the American West. Rag shortage becomes a useful foil in many histories of paper, for it creates dramatic tension while simultaneously introducing human-interest stories of ingenuity, pluck, and thrift. Rag shortage is certainly one part of the story, but an overemphasis on rags has made it easy to forget that rags, like books or clean drinking water or oil or cucumbers, come from somewhere and something. It is true that England lagged behind the rest of Europe when it came to paper production and “relied on imported paper for almost all of its writing and printing needs before the end of the seventeenth century.”101 It is true that when Richard Tottell, printer of law books and of the first anthology of English poetry and charter member of the Stationer’s Company, petitioned for exclusive rights to papermaking in England in 1585, he “accused the French of cornering the supply of rags.”102 But it is also true that,
