of a thistle in the ditch that surrounded a farmer’s meadow.”12 The thistle then relates a story of pride and glory and devastation, of being harvested with the flax in neighboring fields and of hardships on the way to becoming a printed sermon. We are not surprised, at the end, to learn from the human narrator that it was all a dream. Like the tree in “The Dream of the Rood,” the talking thistle/quire of paper was “merely the vision of a drowsy fit.”13
When, in the midst of his reflections on trains and sounds, Thoreau thinks about torn ship sails headed north to be recycled, he ventures even closer to an it-narrative like “The Adventures of a Quire of Paper”: “This car-load of torn sails is more legible and interesting now than if [the sails] should be wrought into paper and printed books. Who can write so graphically the history of the storms they have weathered as these rents have done? They are proof-sheets which need no correction.”14 Pulp them into paper and print Moby-Dick on them and they will not tell better stories of the sea than the stories they already offer in their current, ragged state. And yet these sails are insistently non-prosopopoeic in Thoreau’s telling. If, as Christina Lupton claims, “the defining feature” of it-narratives is that “they are told from the perspective of an object or (less commonly) an animal,” then Thoreau’s sails do not qualify, for though they have recorded the history of the storms, they do not speak up.15 In “Rood” and “Paper,” the dreaming readers or auditors are accosted by objects. In Thoreau, by contrast, a wide-awake reader reckons worn-out sails to be “more legible and interesting” than a sea narrative printed on paper. Legible to whom? Is Thoreau implying that, touching his fingers to the wounds in the sides of these sails, he can recount a detailed narrative of a storm at sea, something rivaling John Donne’s “The Storm”? Perhaps there is a reader, some ancient mariner, to whom each stain and scar recounts a detailed story, but most would rather read Sea Wolf than a sail.
Watching the train pass and imagining its cargo, Thoreau moves from torn hempen sails and their relationship to books to worn-out cotton and flax rags and their relationship to real-life narratives: “These rags in bales, of all hues and qualities, the lowest condition to which cotton and linen descend, the final result of dress,—of patterns which are now no longer cried up, unless it be in Milwaukie, as those splendid articles, English, French, or American prints, ginghams, muslins, &c., gathered from all quarters both of fashion and poverty, going to become paper of one color or a few shades only, on which forsooth will be written tales of real life, high and low, and founded on fact!”16 Within a couple of pages, the train has passed and Thoreau is back to listening to bird sounds, like the dismal scream of a screech owl, which, he claims, is “truly Ben Jonsonian.”17 In other words, soon after Thoreau ends his meditations upon the paper futures of sails and rags, he summons the ghosts of rags and sails past. Indeed, Thoreau scrawls all of these observations on the same kinds of material Jonson used to scrawl his ideas: flax, cotton, and hemp from recycled clothes and sails.
The sameness of source materials across centuries is most apparent in John Taylor’s celebratory poem The Praise of Hemp-seed (1620) (see Figure 3). In Hemp-seed, Taylor observes the same relationship between sails/clothing and paper that Thoreau rhapsodizes about. The hemp plant, writes Taylor,
makes clothes, cordage, halters, ropes and sailes.
From this small Atome, mighty matters springs.18
No stranger to the prosopopoeic narrative (Taylor’s 1630 collected works include Hemp-seed as well as an it-narrative called The Trauels of a tweluepence), in Hemp-seed, Taylor opts to tell the story as a wide-awake human narrator who celebrates hempseed’s many uses and then celebrates its second use in the form of paper (more than half of the poem is devoted to praising hempseed-as-paper). Less than halfway through the poem, Taylor writes,
But paper now’s the subiect of my booke,
And from whence paper it’s beginning tooke:
How that from little Hemp and flaxen seeds
Ropes, halters, drapery, and our napery breeds,
And from these things by Art and true endeuor,
Al paper is deriued, whatsoeuer.19
What we see, then, is that when Thoreau writes about papermaking materials at Walden Pond in the 1840s and/or when revising his manuscript in the 1850s, he describes the same raw materials Taylor was writing about across the Atlantic Ocean nearly two and a half centuries earlier. The material substance of paper is never really invisible, but it is always assumed. For most of the history of the book, rags make paper. It becomes a truism, even a common way of conceptualizing historical communities.20
Reading and comparing these two passages from Thoreau and Taylor, written two centuries apart on two separate continents, we might mistakenly assume that papermaking from hemp-, cotton-, and flax-based rags was a remarkably stable, sustainable enterprise. And yet we know from historical accounts that between the time of Taylor and Thoreau, both England and America faced severe rag shortages. In A History of Paper-Manufacturing in the United States, 1690–1916, Lyman Horace Weeks claims that “the history of paper-making in Europe and in the United States is shot through and through with the records of persistent speculating and experimenting in the endeavor to escape from the limitation imposed upon it by sole dependence upon rags.”21 The young, independent American “Republic of Letters” depended heavily on European rags—rags that were already in short supply in Europe. By the end of the eighteenth century, newspaper advertisements routinely admonished households to recycle their rags for the good of the community and, eventually, for the good of the nation, rather than reusing rags within the home. Susan Strasser cites newspaper advertisements as “evidence of perpetual rag shortage in the colonies and the new nation and of the papermakers’ strategies of propaganda, education, and entreaty, aimed at gathering enough rags to keep new mills running.”22
It is shocking, in retrospect, to consider how long it took for wood pulp to replace flax (and cotton and hemp) as the primary raw material from which paper is made, especially when “for more than a hundred years, the existence of the industry was constantly imperiled by this scarcity.”23 Weeks writes of the “curious and exceedingly interesting chapter” in American history “which treats of the persistent and not always successful struggle for raw material to keep the mills going.”24 He goes on to cite lists of hundreds of raw materials from which experimental paper was made, lists that include substances such as animal excrement, asbestos, asparagus, bananas, beets, brewery refuse, corncobs, cucumbers, dust, hop vines, horseradish, moss, peat, pineapples, pine shavings, turnips, and seaweed.25 American papermakers began experimenting with local natural resources as early as the 1790s as numerous organizations, including the American Philosophical Society and the American Company of Booksellers, offered prizes for innovators who could discover a suitable replacement for rags. Woven into the language of these inquiries and experiments is a patriotic optimism that the untapped landscape of America would yield a new plant-based substitute for rags. In 1785, the poet Philip Freneau reimagined Palemon, a character who appears in Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale and Shakespeare’s Two Noble Kinsmen, immigrating to America “to tame the soil, and plant the arts.”26 Well into the nineteenth century, American innovators were still struggling to find the plant that would help them escape dependency on European rags and realize their ambition of planting the arts. Back in Europe, some innovators were similarly drawn to the idea of making paper from native resources—not from an exotic new plant, but from some overlooked but viable source.
Fascinating stories of rag recycling, of rag-collecting propaganda, and of shocking materials like asparagus and excrement used to make paper are not uncommon. They tend to put all of the emphasis on humans, on
