A poem printed on paper can be read and circulated and preserved differently than a poem written on parchment or engraved on a stone monument or, for that matter, a poem inscribed on a cucumber.33
Confluence: Academic, Conservatorial, Artisanal
Inscribed cucumbers, as it happens, are a part of paper’s fascinating history of raw materials to rags to reading matter, a history that has been told and retold in prose and in poetry for centuries. The story of paper is captivating in part because paper is both perfectly familiar, a quotidian object used in unremarkable ways each day, and perfectly exceptional, a remarkably important cultural commodity with an intriguing backstory. In The New Organon (1620), Francis Bacon says paper is both “a common enough thing” and “a unique instance of art,” an “absolutely unique” artificial material that, although made from nature “change[s] her completely.”34 Fascination with the simultaneous oddity and mundanity of paper has inspired a vast body of literature on its history and uses, but the works that this book engages can be grouped into three kinds of expertise on early handmade paper, three streams of interest: academic, conservatorial, and artisanal. These streams of interest begin with different kinds of questions, are driven by different currents, and, as one would expect, end by telling stories in which certain kinds of details tend to surface. When they converge in The Nature of the Page, the currents shift and roil at the confluence, different kinds of details find their way to the surface, and a new, ecological story can be told about hundreds of years of human ideas entangled in plant fibers.
Academic studies focused on particular periods and/or techniques, especially those focused on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century handmade paper in England, are one set of sources that have contributed much to our knowledge of papermaking and paper use in recent years.35 Despite its modest title, John Bidwell’s essay “French Paper in English Books” still serves as one of the best, most concise introductions to papermaking in and around England from the mid-1500s through the late 1600s, and Helen Smith’s recent essay, subtitled “The Proliferating Surfaces of Early Modern Paper,” offers an overview of paper importation and papermaking in Renaissance England that brilliantly condenses the story into a dozen impressively documented paragraphs.36 Period-focused introductions to the study of book history are similarly insightful as guides to early paper production and use.37 Renewed interest in the materiality of textual forms has inspired a number of more focused studies that build upon standard works in the field, such as D. C. Coleman’s The British Paper Industry, 1495–1860 and Richard L. Hills’s Papermaking in Britain, 1488–1988, while offering exciting new insights into the social circulation of paper.38 Heather Wolfe’s groundbreaking research on paper costs, which calls into question the often-repeated claim that writing paper was an expensive commodity in the Renaissance, stands out as an example of new research that corrects overgeneralizations that have long been accepted as fact.39 Finally, because of its unique focus on pre-Gutenberg paper outside of Europe, Jonathan M. Bloom’s Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World has proven an indispensable resource, one that strips away assumptions and reminds readers who typically handle sixteenth-century English books that the ink-imprinted, flax-based paper in those volumes is just one realized possibility, one version of paper among many.40 Taken together as a stream of interest in paper and paper-making, these scholarly studies brim with questions about how paper came to be and how it came to be used, and their answers to these questions contribute invaluable historical context to the story that this book tells.41
Conservatorial interest in stabilizing and preserving the paper that has survived to the present day contributes another stream of vital information about paper and papermaking. “Because so much of our heritage … is paper-based, the importance of these artifacts is undeniable, and the need to conserve them is critical,” writes Timothy P. Whalen, director of the Getty Conservation Institute, in a foreword to Historical Perspectives in the Conservation of Works of Art on Paper.42 The volume, edited by Margaret Holben Ellis and comprised of a variety of historical perspectives on paper conservation, brings together centuries of dialogue about paper as a valued but imperfectly preserved object. A more focused but equally essential work in this category, John Krill’s English Artists’ Paper: Renaissance to Regency offers a fine-grained account of “the more than supportive role which paper has played in the graphic arts” told by an expert paper conservator with decades of hands-on experience in world-class museums.43 More recently, Fabriano: City of Medieval and Renaissance Paper-making, by Sylvia Rodgers Albro, a senior paper conservator at the Library of Congress, offers an impressive, capacious history of papermaking materials and methods while focusing the narrative on a single locale.44 Both Krill’s and Albro’s volumes are heavily and beautifully illustrated so that readers can see, for instance, photomicrographs of flax and cotton fibers at 50x magnification.45 A significant development in the spread of conservatorial expertise between Krill’s book (2002) and Albro’s book (2016) is that in recent years, conservators at many institutions have begun publishing short, heavily illustrated, blog-style explorations filled with detailed, useful information about paper preservation. Recent posts to the British Library’s Collection Care blog have included discussions of insect-damaged pages bound in manuscript fragments as well as “a leaf-casting machine [that] can transform a damaged object in an instant with the help of paper pulp, gravity, and suction.”46 The conservation process, then, has grown increasingly visual and accessible as archives and libraries self-publish content on their websites and share images from the conservation lab on social media.
The artisanal work of hand papermakers contributes a third stream of expert information on early handmade paper. Broadly speaking, while book historians focus on recovering what was and while conservators focus on preserving what is, hand papermakers tend to be uniquely interested in imagining what can be. They approach the materials differently, ask different kinds of questions, and emphasize aspects of the process that a book historian might easily overlook. Like conservators, they think about fibers and fiber structure. They also think not only about the fibers that have been used historically for paper, but also about fibers that can be used—and the chemical composition of those fibers. For instance, in a brief introduction to the craft, papermaker Walter Hamady is quick to point out 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.”47 Some papermakers, like Timothy Barrett, are actively striving to understand and replicate the techniques of early hand papermakers and publishing what they learn from that quest.48 Barrett’s website, Paper Through Time: Nondestructive Analysis of 14th- Through 19th-Century Papers, represents the gathered expertise of a master papermaker who is also deeply invested in conservation, and the introduction offered on that site, “European Papermaking Techniques, 1300–1800,” is an essential contribution to scholarship on the history of papermaking.49 The best broad overview in this category is Therese Weber’s The Language of Paper: A History of 2000 Years, a comprehensive history of papermaking filled with details and insights and connections I have not found in other histories of paper.50 Throughout this work I return again and again to the published work of papermakers like Hamady, Barrett, and Weber, to short articles printed in the journal Hand Papermaking, and to personal notes I have taken while interviewing master papermakers, particularly Robert Possehl.
Overview
The Nature of the Page is organized in two parts, “Legible Ecologies” and “Indistinct Ecologies,” both of which emphasize the varied ways that humans recognize or do not recognize the plants, animals, and minerals in their media. Part I, “Legible Ecologies,” takes up a narrative that is familiar to anyone who has engaged with the history of papermaking: handmade paper is made from other substances that circulated in societies, and not only papermakers and bookmakers but also readers and writers thought about the circulation of these materials. However, while previous studies of papermaking have tended to focus on the circulation of human commodities,
