Praise

From the reviews of Paper: An Elegy:

‘Ian Sansom’s Paper: An Elegy has an intensity that might seem alarming if you didn’t share his obsession … Sansom’s scholarship is prodigious; his enthusiasm inexhaustible … He can make one laugh out loud by his placing of a single word (“Anyway”). He writes that when he dies, he wants to be buried in a paper coffin. And by the time you’ve finished reading this extraordinary book, so will you.’ Jane Shilling, Daily Telegraph

‘He settles on calling his book a “personally curated Paper Museum”, but few curators are so engaging and dynamic.’ Andrew Martin, Financial Times

‘His wonderfully diverting book … is not strictly a history of paper; rather, he invites us to explore it as we might wander around an eccentrically curated museum. One may also imagine it as a vast shoebox stuffed with fascinating facts jotted on a multi tude of scraps shored against paper’s ruin … splendidly dense with fact and thought.’ Steven Poole, Times Literary Supplement

For Nicholas and George, with thanks for Christmas lunch

The old book collector’s pulse was almost visible, throbbing in his wrist and temples. His voice became deeper as he held the book up to his eyes so he could read more clearly. His expression was radiant.

‘A magnificent book,’ confirmed Corso,

dragging on his cigarette.

‘It’s more than that. Feel the paper.’

ARTURO PÉREZ-REVERTE, The Club Dumas (1993)

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Praise

Dedication

Epigraph

RESPECTING PAPER: An Introduction

1. A Miracle of Inscrutable Intricacy

2. In the Wood

3. Walking Papers

4. Victims to the BIBLIOMANIA!

5. Ornamenting the Façade of Hell

6. The Soul of Advertisement

7. Constructive Thinking

8. The Secret is the Paper

9. The Squiggle Game

10. A Wonderful Mental and Physical Therapy

11. Legitimationspapiere

12. Five Leaves Left

THE HOLLOW IN THE PAPER: Acknowledgements

TEARING THE BOOK INTO PIECES: A Bibliography

Text Permissions

About the Author

By the same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Bookplate by Aubrey Beardsley © The Bridgeman Art Library Ltd

RESPECTING PAPER An Introduction

First of all, respect your paper!

J.M.W. TURNER’s advice to Mary Lloyd, recollected by her in 1880, quoted in Turner Studies, vol. 4, no. 1 (1984)

Welcome to the Paper Museum. The museum is dedicated to the preservation and study of paper and paper products, including not only – and obviously – books, letters and diaries, but also account ledgers and ballot papers, bandboxes and banderoles, bandages and dressings, bank cheques and ledgers, banners and bunting, beer mats, birth certificates, death certificates, baptism and bastardy papers, board games, bookmarks, business cards, cartons and packaging, menus, bills of fare and cash register receipts, charts (nautical, medical, educational and otherwise), cigarette papers, clothes (including suits, hats, shirts, overcoats, kimonos, overalls and coveralls), coffins, colouring books, confetti, coupons, construction and tracing paper, emery boards, envelopes, filters and gauzes (medical, industrial and culinary), fireworks, flypaper and official forms of all kinds, funeralia, greeting cards, postcards, kites, carpets, lanterns and lampshades, library cards, identity cards and passports, magazines, catalogues, newspapers, maps and globes, paper bags, paper cups, paper dolls, paper flowers, paper money, paper pipes, panoramas, photographs, playing cards, postage stamps, Post-it notes, posters, prescriptions, puzzles, report cards and registers, sandpaper, shoe boxes, stationery, stickers, streamers, tags, labels and tickets, tea bags, telephone directories, wall-paper, wrapping paper, etc., etc., etc.

We live in a paper world. Without paper our lives would be unimaginable. Or almost unimaginable. We can, of course, imagine it, as we can imagine anything, for the great writers and artists and musicians have taught us to imagine, in their books, and their paintings, and through their music. We have been trained by them, educated by them on paper, and through paper, and by paper, to imagine. So it’s easy to imagine a world without paper. Like being dead, or never having been born.

We arise, wash, and go to the toilet – though without toilet paper. We enjoy a bowl of cereal, unpackaged, naturally. Tea: no bags. Coffee: no filter. We do not buy a newspaper on our way to the train station: there are no newspapers to buy. And besides, we have no money. Well, coins maybe. Bags of coins. Or cowrie shells. But we buy no lottery ticket. And no chewing gum: no wrapper. No ticket for the train – which, anyway, has no timetable. (We’ll assume, just for fun, that there is a train, and a train station, and a house, and an office or workplace to go to – although without plans and schedules and surveys and backs-of-envelopes and blueprints and patents and maps and graphs, all of this is of course highly unlikely; not impossible, but about as likely as you being able to read these words without ever having read or written anything on a piece of paper.) We certainly shall not gaze at advertisements on the train, or at hoardings or billboards. Nor buy a cup of takeaway coffee, in a takeaway coffee cup, protected by a takeaway coffee-cup sleeve, and our nonexistent loyalty card can remain forever lost, forgotten and unstamped. Nor do we post our mail: there is no Post Office. So no Amazon packages. Nor do we spend our days printing out emails, filing papers in folders, filling in forms, surrounded by familiar wallpaper and family photos, sticking up Post-it notes, or writing ‘documents’ on screen and ‘filing’ them in ‘folders’. Nor do we read a magazine or a paperback at lunchtime, while eating a sandwich neither wrapped nor carried in paper, our greasy hands untouched by a paper napkin. At no point in the afternoon do we file our nails with an emery board, fix our make-up, or blow our nose with a tissue. No cupcake cases, no cake boxes. No business cards. No bills. No banks. No building societies. No insurance companies. A little industry, perhaps, a little government. Maybe some law and order. But certainly we smoke no cigarettes, wipe no bottoms with a wet wipe, wrap no presents, nor mark, correct or assist with any homework, read no menus, send no Christmas cards, pull no crackers, light no fireworks …

Imagine for a moment that paper were to disappear. Would anything be lost? Everything would be lost.

We have been using paper for around two thousand years. What began in China as a rare and precious material and commodity eventually spread and spread, like alarm and disease, and dreams and despondency, until the nineteenth century, when papermaking machines replaced hand production. Then things really took off, and the truly phantasmagoric age of paper began. The average office employee in the West now uses over ten thousand sheets of paper per year. If you live in America you consume, all told, about 750 lbs of paper per year – which is about the weight of seven bags of cement, or 150 bags of sugar – maybe more. If paper did not exist, then someone would have to invent it – Gutenberg, probably, because what use would his movable type have been without it? Paper is the ultimate man-made material. It’s cheap, light, durable, and can be folded and cut and bent and twisted and lacquered and woven and waterproofed so that it can be used in almost any way and for anything. What, boats? Yes. Clothes? Yes. Furniture? Yes. Houses? Yes. Weapons? Yes. Games, puzzles and toys? Yes. The wheels on high-speed trains? Yes. And we shall come to them all later.

But these are only paper’s more prosaic uses. In Japan, cut as streamers, paper consecrates sacred places. In India, during religious festivals, cut paper, sanjih, is placed on the floor to produce rangoli, the beautiful decorative shapes and patterns that welcome the Hindu deities. In Switzerland, elaborate paper-cuts are used to ratify legal documents. In China, at a Taoist or Buddhist funeral, sacred papers are burned to ease the passage of the dead through to the other world. And in the stories of Sherlock Holmes, criminals are caught with the simple application of brain to paper. ‘“I have some papers here,” said my friend Sherlock Holmes as we sat one winter’s night on either side of the fire, “which I really think, Watson, that it would be worth your while to glance over”’ (‘The Gloria Scott’). At a glance, and just for fun, here is Holmes on paper: in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ he establishes, with the aid of his Continental Gazetteer, that a crucial piece of paper was produced in Bohemia; in The Sign of Four he even more quickly deduces, without assistance, that a piece of paper is ‘of native Indian manufacture’; his monographs on technical subjects include not only the celebrated ‘Practical Handbook of Bee Culture’, ‘Upon the Distinction Between the Ashes of the Various Tobaccos’ and contributions to the study of tattooing, ears, the form of the hand, the tracing of footsteps and the polyphonic motets of Lassus, but also a ‘trifling’ monograph upon the subject of secret writings, and one upon the dating of documents; and in ‘The Stock-broker’s Clerk’ he is able to tell Watson’s state of health from a scrap of paper:

‘Your slippers are new,’ he said. ‘You could not have had them more than a few weeks. The soles which you are at this moment presenting to me are slightly scorched. For a moment I thought they might have got wet and been burned in the drying. But near the instep there is a small circular wafer of paper with the shopman’s hieroglyphics upon it. Damp would of course have removed this. You had, then, been sitting with your feet outstretched to the fire, which a man would hardly do even in so wet a June as this if he were in his full health.’

Just so.

And as such paper logic relentlessly proceeds, so paper itself might be revealed to be the unlikely foundation of the world. In origami, we learn first to make a base, the bird base, or the frog base, and from this base we can build any number of shapes and models, constructing worlds from simple folds and creases. In the same way, paper has been the base, the foundation of all the curious folds and creases of our history: our economy, our art, our wars and our attempts to make peace have all been conducted by means of paper. Elementary.

Yet, as we are forever being reminded, we are now entering a world beyond paper, or certain forms of paper. Everywhere we look, paper is disappearing. We can book and check-in on a flight without any paper changing hands (though we may still need a passport, and a visa, and a list to remind us to pack our passport and our visa, and onboard we may be glad of a paperback, and the sick bag, and the laminated emergency instructions, and the pre-thumbed in-flight magazine, and the wake-up paper face-wipes). We have ticketless parking, and e-books and iPads. And yet at the same time, paper is also proliferating: more and more books are being published; more barista-proffered paper cups dispensed; more and more homes equipped with their very own HP desktop printer. Is This the End of the Book?, the newspaper headlines endlessly ask. Will there be a continuing role for paper?

Short answer: yes.

This book will attempt to show, at much greater length, that reports of the death of paper have been greatly exaggerated. As the richly paper-fed French philosopher Jacques Derrida remarked, ‘To say farewell to paper today would be rather like deciding one fine day to stop speaking because you had learned to write.’ Derrida returns again and again in his work to the question – the questions, rather – of paper. ‘Seeing all these questions emerging on paper, I have the impression … that I have never had any other subject: basically, paper, paper, paper.’

Paper, paper, paper. Anyone old enough to remember floppy disks will remember that paperlessness was once a universal goal among get-ahead office managers. But as Abigail J. Sellen and Richard H.R. Harper explain in their book The Myth of the Paperless Office (2001), it soon became apparent that technological development – and in particular the introduction of email, and network computing – increased rather than decreased office paper consumption. According to Sellen and Harper, technological change has not replaced paper use but rather has shifted ‘the point at which paper is used’: we distribute then print, rather than print and distribute. And anyway, the ultimate goal of all technological development seems to be a paper-like device on which information can not only be accessed, sent and read, but also marked up in a paperlike way. Paper remains the ghost in our machines. We are, simply, paper fanatics and paper fundamentalists: even when it’s not there, when it has been shown to be unnecessary or not to exist, we continue to imagine it, to honour it, and to wish it into being.

The word-processing document I am currently typing onto and into, for example, has – for no good reason at all – the appearance of a sheet of white paper. In the corner of the screen sits an image of a waste-paper basket. There are margins. Paragraphs. The little page-counter at the bottom of the ‘page’ tells me that this is ‘page’ 4 – though how can it be, unless I imagine some vast Platonic paper mill somewhere behind the screen? My ‘wallpaper’ shows a misty mountaintop, like a mural or giant photo pinned to an imaginary wall. The great irony of the end of the age of paper is that the image of paper is everywhere increasing, and continues to determine the shape and scene of our writing and reading. This may be because paper is so useful as a metaphor for language itself – as Saussure notes in his Course in General Linguistics, ‘Language can also be compared with a sheet of paper: thought is the front side and sound the back; one cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time; likewise in language, one can neither divide sound from thought nor thought from sound; the division could be accomplished only abstractedly, and the result would be either pure psychology or pure phonology.’ We can’t seem to abstract or extract paper from our thinking, or our thinking from paper. We change. Words change. But the paper remains the same. It can absorb everything, and be absorbed into everything. Even the most advanced and cherished technologies of our age resemble the page: the iPad is like a jotter; the Kindle like a book; the mobile phone a pocket diary. And the page continues to determine the rhythm of our reading – on my Kindle, page 2 still follows page 1, as sure as night follows day, and the long shadow of paper continues to determine the very colour of my reading. Why black marks on white, on screen, if not because of paper?

It is perhaps because paper is forever disappearing and reappearing in this way – burnt, lost, discarded, disowned, rediscovered, restored, reified – that it remains ancillary to most academic study, so insignificant and inessential as barely to merit discussion outside specialist books, journals and publications. (In Japanese there’s a phrase, yokogami-yaburi, which means to tear paper sideways against its grain – idiomatically, it means ‘perversity’ or ‘pig-headedness’. By ignoring paper, we are perverse; we go against the grain.) Because of its everyday usefulness, paper is an artifact without a popular history. Paper: An Elegy is an attempt to trace and recover some of this history in its many forms.

What this book is not, strictly speaking, is a history of paper. It is, rather, a kind of personally curated Paper Museum, a boutique museum, perhaps, or a musée imaginaire, an imaginary museum, a term borrowed from André Malraux, novelist, art historian and also, somehow, in that extraordinary French way, French Minister of Cultural Affairs from 1959 to 1969. Malraux realised that many of the objects that people now think of as art were not originally regarded as art at all: they were totems or amulets, emanations or images of the gods. ‘In the seventeenth century,’ writes Malraux in The Imaginary Museum of World Sculpture (3 volumes, 1952–54), ‘a Sung painting would not have been compared with a work by Poussin: that would have meant comparing a “strange-looking” landscape with a noble work of art.’ The imaginary museum, according to Malraux, was a ‘song of metamorphosis’, a ‘re-creation of the universe, confronting the Creation’; it was a celebration of all that might be called art, rather than everything that had been art. So, in the Paper Museum, a Dickens manuscript might sit alongside blue sugar paper and brown paper packages tied up with string, forming a kind of vast paper mirror in which we might view ourselves and our world – colossal, dreadful and amazing.

Any history of paper, it should further be said, for the purpose of clarification – and in particular this history of paper, which is not a history of paper – is not the same thing as a history of the book, nor indeed the same thing as a history of writing. There are plenty of such histories already. There was of course writing before paper, on birch bark, clay tablets, ivory, wood and bone, papyrus, palm leaves and silk. And there is writing after paper. There were also books before paper, on papyrus and parchment; and there are books after paper. Paper: An Elegy is not really about books, though books are undoubtedly one of the most ubiquitous of paper products. Nor is it a book about paper-making, in itself a vast and fascinating subject. Paper: An Elegy is, rather, an attempt to show how and why humans became attached to paper and became engrafted and sutured onto and into it, so that our very being might be described as papery.

Because everything that matters to us happens on paper. Without paper, we are nothing. We are born, and issued with a birth certificate. We collect more of these certificates at school, and yet another when we marry, and another when we divorce, and buy a house, and when we die. We are born human, but are forever becoming paper, as paper becomes us, our artificial skin. Everything we are is paper: it is the ground of activity, the partner to all our enterprises, the key to our understanding of the past. How do we know the past? Only through paper and all it records – and through architecture, of course, though architecture, as we shall see, rather depends on paper. So. Paper wraps stone.

Paper: An Elegy will address and acknowledge the great pathos of paper, and our nostalgia for its past: the thickness and weight of old writing paper; the tattered posters of our idealistic youth; the increasing vulnerability and scarcity of all those scraps of paper that represent our personal and collective history. But above all it will be concerned with the paradoxes of paper, the ironies of its uses, its multiple meanings, its values, and its extraordinary scope and scale. The fact that a piece of paper may be a priceless artifact – a painting or a manuscript – or a piece of litter. The simple fact that it may bring glad tidings, or spread bad news: a love letter, and a suicide note. That it is both adequate to communication, and inadequate to thought: antecedent to thought, and a posteriori. A form of external memory, and the means by which we forget. Lacking in substance, yet full of value. Material and simulacrum. Vulnerable and durable. (Tales of lost manuscripts are legion: Carlyle’s famous manuscript of the first volume of his The French Revolution, used by a maid to light the fire; Thomas De Quincey losing his notes for Confessions of an English Opium-Eater when ‘The spark of a candle [fell] unobserved amongst a very large pile of papers in a bedroom’; Tennyson losing the manuscript of his Poems, Chiefly Lyrical from his gaping great-coat pocket.) Delicate yet sharp, and capable of inflicting cuts. Ephemeral yet everlasting. (Byron in Don Juan: ‘To what straits old Time reduces/Frail man, when paper, even a rag like this,/Survives himself, his tomb, and all that’s his.’) Everything and nothing: the ultimate MacGuffin. An object that somehow magically grants us access to ourselves, that leads us from the surface into imaginary worlds, and deep within, a threshold to what Henri Bergson called ‘the uninterrupted humming of life’s depths’.

And the greatest irony of all? Paper’s most powerful magic? Simply this. That paper allows us to be present – or to appear to be present – when we are in fact absent. It both breaks and bridges time and distance. I am talking to you now, for example, on paper. You cannot see me, and you cannot hear me. I may, for all you know, already be dead. But by the mysterious application of pen to paper, and by your patient reading, we have between us conjured the illusion of communication: a voice on the page, and my disappearance into that voice on the page. Paper provides for my self-invention, my self-disclosure, and my self-erasure. Total visibility. Perfect camouflage. In William Golding’s novel Free Fall (1959) the narrator addresses the reader: ‘I tick. I exist. I am poised eighteen inches over the black rivets you are reading, I am in your place, I am shut in a bone box and trying to fasten myself on the white paper. The rivets join us together and yet for all the passion we share nothing but our sense of division.’ Here I am. There I go.

Paper: An Elegy is intended in part as a technological and material history, but more importantly as a symbolic history, or a history of symbols, of how paper becomes sacred, and sacralised and fetishised, how it promises and provides us with freedoms, and imposes upon us clear boundaries. There is, alas, much paper that will be missing from the book: no decoupage; no exam papers; no musical scores; no Top Trumps. Online, such limits do not apply: we can just click through. (And let me mention here some words, phrases and ideas that might send you scurrying to Google – papier poudré, papillotes, papeterie, paper-ministers, paper-skulls, paperage, papercrete and papercreters, the infinite history of litter.) There are so many types and kinds of paper that I have had to leave unfingered and untouched. Among Japanese papers alone, there are, or were, hundreds of unexplored treasures: hiki-awase, once used as the inner lining of a warrior’s breastplate; hosokawa-shi, used for government land records; shibugami, the persimmon-juice-impregnated paper used for the sacks in which grains and cereals were stored; the rickshaw driver’s padded paper coats; the paper used to wrap medicines; the paper used to wrap a kimono. The sounds of different papers. The smells of different papers; the smell of ammonia used in large office print machines. The collection is not complete. But it has begun.

We have lived in a world of paper, and we are paper people. In Salvador Plascencia’s novel The People of Paper (2005) – a masterpiece of paper, on paper – a monk named Antonio becomes ‘the first origami surgeon’. His skills are extraordinary, but he is, inevitably, excommunicated, outcast and unemployed, until one day he retreats, alone, to a factory with a wheelbarrow filled with cardboard and napkins and books:

Antonio split the spines of books, spilling leaves of Austen and Cervantes, sheets from Leviticus and Judges, all mixing with the pages of The Book of Incandescent Light. Then Antonio unrolled the wrapping paper and construction paper and began to cut at the cardboard and then fold.

She was the first to be created: cardboard legs, cellophane appendix, and paper breasts. Created not from the rib of a man but from paper scraps.

This magnificent creature rises from Antonio’s cutting table, steps over her exhausted, dying creator, and strides out into the world.

Let us take her hand now and enter the Paper Museum.

A Note on the Paper Used in the Writing of this Book

All my books have really been counterproofs, or offsets, re-marques, like cartoons, those drawings made to the same scale as the grand painting or fresco but which are in fact only preparatory, and which are applied to the wall, and pricked through or indented: a mere outline or image of some greater design.

This book I like to think of not as a cartoon but as like John F. Peto’s ‘Old Scraps’ (1894), a miniature trompe l’oeil. Or a trompe l’esprit.

‘I am typing this book on yellow paper,’ announces the narrator of Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper (1936). ‘It is very yellow paper, and it is this very yellow paper because often sometimes I am typing it in my room at my office, and the paper I use for Sir Phoebus’s letters is blue paper with his name across the corner.’ The yellow paper helps distinguish the novel from the work.

Alas, I have adopted no such sensible system.

I have typed on a laptop, and on a desktop. I have read many books: paper books, Kindle books, Google books. I have read articles online, in print journals, and in magazines. I have made copies; I have pressed ‘Print’. I have written notes in margins, and I have written notes, by hand, in notebooks, and on A4 narrow-feint paper. I have organised my notes into folders. I have disorganised my notes in the folders. I have typed sentences, then paragraphs, then chapters. I have printed out these chapters, marked up revisions and corrections in pencil, and then incorporated these changes, and printed out the chapters again. And again. And again. And again. And then finally, I sent the ‘document’ by email to my editor, who suggested further changes. Some of which I ignored. Most of which I ignored. But some of which I incorporated. And all of which required yet more printing, and marking up and correcting, before sending it all off again. And then again. Proofs. More corrections. More proofs. Interminable? Inexplicable.

In total, this book is made from twenty reams of plain white 80 gsm copier paper, fifteen A4 lined, narrow-feint pads, four Moleskine pocket notebooks, six packs of A5 lined index cards, fifty manila folders (green), and three wrist-thick blocks of Post-it notes (assorted colours). I’m sure there are easier ways of writing books.

Too much? Too much. Not enough.

Japanese tissue paper with fine swirls of fibre

Making Japanese paper:

1 Stripping the bark

2 Soaking the bark in water

3 Beating the fibres to a pulp

4 Placing the paper mould into the vat of pulp

5 Drying and polishing the resulting sheet of paper

You are living, let us say, in Japan, two thousand years ago. You and your family have planted some trees – mulberry trees. The trees grow. You remove some of the branches of the trees and steam them in order to loosen the inner bark. You peel and dry and soak and scrape and rinse the bark. You find this pleasing: it turns the bark whiter and lighter. The fibres of the bark begin to separate. You boil the bark to soften it further, and then you bleach it in the sun. And then you beat it, and you beat it, and you beat it with a wooden beater and then you throw lumps of this bleached bark pulp into a vat filled with water. And then you mix it and beat it again. And again. You now have a vat of grey mush. You take a wooden frame with a sieve-like screen, dip it into the mush, scoop up the frame, tossing off the excess water, and rock it back and forth until you have a nice, smooth, consistent sheet of mush on your sieve. You allow all the water to drain off. Now you have a sort of damp mat of macerated fibre stuck to your sieve. You remove this mat from the sieve, and place it on a wooden board to dry. It dries, and you smooth it and polish it, maybe with some animal fat or maybe just with a stone, anything you can get your hands on to make it shiny and smooth. And then you trim the edges and admire your handiwork. Congratulations. You have produced a sheet of paper.

Basically, paper has continued to be made by this method throughout the world to this very day, and seems likely to continue to be made by the same method tomorrow. Compare the ancient Japanese technique to John Evelyn’s description of hand paper-making in seventeenth-century England, for example, from his diary, dated 24 August 1678:

I went to see my Lord of St. Alban’s house, at Byfleet, an old large building. Thence, to the paper-mills, where I found them making a coarse white paper. They cull the rags which are linen for white paper, woollen for brown; then they stamp them in troughs to a pap, with pestles, or hammers, like the powder-mills, then put it into a vessel of water, in which they dip a frame closely wired with wire as small as a hair and as close as a weaver’s reed; on this they take up the pap, the superfluous water draining through the wire; this they dexterously turning, shake out like a pancake on a smooth board between two pieces of flannel, then press it between a great press, the flannel sucking out the moisture; then, taking it out, they ply and dry it on strings, as they dry linen in the laundry; then dip it in alum-water, lastly, polish and make it up in quires. They put some gum in the water in which they macerate the rags. The mark we find on the sheets is formed in the wire.

The details may differ, but the processes remain essentially the same (as indeed did Evelyn’s famous note-taking habit, established at the age of just eleven, and which sustained him over seventy years, through Oxford, a Grand Tour, the English Civil War, Cromwell’s Protectorate, the Restoration, and work on dozens of books and treatises).

Industrial methods have now largely replaced hand-beating and dipping and drying, with mechanical agitators to beat pulp, and high-pressure jets and conveyor belts to spray it and spread it, and vacuums and cylinders and presses to dry it, and rollers to polish it, but there are still really only three stages in the whole paper-production process: the preparing of the pulp; the forming of the paper on a mould or a mesh; and the drying and finishing. In a modern paper plant, these stages translate into a process that goes something like this. Bales of wood pulp are fed into a hydrapulper, in which the pulp is diluted with water and mixed – think of a hydrapulper as a giant Moulinex, and the pulp as paper-gruel. The porridge-like substance produced – the ‘stock’ or ‘stuff’ – can then be further diluted and undergo further beating, or fibrillation, to cut and break up the fibres of the pulp, and screened to remove impurities, and blended with various additives. Then, and only then, is the stuff ready for the papermaking machine proper. A typical modern machine is mind-bogglingly huge: hundreds of metres long, costing millions, running twenty-four hours a day and capable of producing hundreds of thousands of tonnes of paper every year. The slurry, or stock – which looks like milk at this stage, or at least a kind of thin white water – passes through a ‘flow box’ or ‘head box’, where it is sprayed onto a mesh conveyor belt. As the stock is sprayed, the water drains through the mesh, leaving behind a fibrous mat, just as in the early Japanese hand moulds, only on a massive scale, and at astonishing speed. The stuff then passes through heavy rollers, with more moisture being squeezed and sucked out, and beneath a dandy roll, and through steam-heated drying cylinders and a size press, where sizing is added – the starch that reduces absorbency – and then over the calender, the big iron rollers which polish and glaze the surface of the paper, and finally it passes onto large reels, ready to be cut into sheets or split into smaller reels and packed for despatch to paper merchants and converters who will produce and package the paper ready for you to print out your essential emails and flight boarding details.

Papermaking: the same yesterday, today and tomorrow

A diagram of a papermaking machine

It is an amazing sight to see a modern paper machine in full flow, even now in the twenty-first century: in the nineteenth century it was nothing less than astonishing. Herman Melville, that great nineteenth-century chronicler of astonishment, describes a paper mill in his story ‘The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids’ (1855), in which the narrator visits a mill which is oddly but reassuringly very like a whale, a ‘large whitewashed factory’, ‘like an arrested avalanche’. This vast white beast, which swallows up rags and water and people, is located ‘not far from Woedolor Mountain in New England … By the country people … called the Devil’s Dungeon’. The narrator of the story is a businessman, ‘Having embarked on a large scale in the seedsman’s business’, who is seeking a cheap wholesale source for seed packets. Inside the factory he stands, amazed:

Something of awe now stole over me, as I gazed upon this inflexible iron animal. Always, more or less, machinery of this ponderous, elaborate sort strikes, in some moods, strange dread into the human heart, as some living, panting Behemoth might. But what made the thing I saw so specially terrible to me was the metallic necessity, the unbudging fatality which governed it. Though, here and there, I could not follow the thin, gauzy veil of pulp in the course of its more mysterious or entirely invisible advance, yet it was indubitable that, at those points where it eluded me, it still marched on in unvarying docility to the autocratic cunning of the machine. A fascination fastened on me. I stood spellbound and wandering in my soul. Before my eyes – there, passing in slow procession along the wheeling cylinders, I seemed to see, glued to the pallid incipience of the pulp, the yet more pallid faces of all the pallid girls I had eyed that heavy day. Slowly, mournfully, beseechingly, yet unresistingly, they gleamed along, their agony dimly outlined on the imperfect paper, like the print of the tormented face on the handkerchief of Saint Veronica.

Who could possibly have conceived of such a monster, such a panting Behemoth? A man called Louis-Nicolas Robert could. Like Melville, Robert too saw the pallid faces of the workers in the pallid incipience of the pulp, though where Melville saw agony and torment, Robert saw freedom and liberation. In its very incarnation, by its very originators, the papermaking machine was seen as a metallic necessity, a triumph of technology over man.

Louis-Nicolas Robert, born in Paris in 1761 and nicknamed ‘the Philosopher’ at school, became a soldier in the French army, in the First Battalion of the Grenoble Artillery. Restless and dissatisfied, and with no prospect of promotion, he eventually found himself back in Paris in the very midst of the French Revolution, working as ‘an inspector of personnel’, a classic petit cadre, in a paper mill at Essonnes, to the south of Paris, where he was appalled by the behaviour of the workers, who had become infected with the ideas of the times. Encouraged by his employer, François Didot, Robert began experimenting with plans for a machine that could replace the troublesome papermakers. After much trial and error just such a machine was devised, and on 18 January 1799 Robert was granted a patent for a papermaking machine to make ‘sheets of an extraordinary length without the help of any worker’. Ironically, Robert and Didot then began wrangling between themselves, arguing about money and the patent, but since neither man could afford to make a success of the enterprise alone, Didot called upon his brother-in-law John Gamble, an Englishman, who took drawings and samples of the machine-made paper to London in 1801, hoping to find investors. Gamble got lucky: he managed to persuade a famous, wealthy family of London stationers, the Fourdriniers, to back him, and together they were soon granted an English patent for an ‘Invention for Making Paper’ (‘in single sheets, without seam or joining, from one to twelve feet and upwards wide and from one to forty feet and upwards in length’). The industrial history of papermaking had begun.

Robert’s machine was brought from France in 1802, and the Fourdriniers employed a young man called Bryan Donkin to modify and improve it. Like Robert a genius in the pay of the boss class, Donkin became a kind of consultant inventor who worked out of a factory set up for him by the Fourdriniers in Bermondsey, where he established the first British cannery, was responsible for developing split steel nibs for pens, designed and improved metalworking tools such as lathes and drills, and ended up advising Marc Isambard Brunel in his work on the Thames Tunnel. But the paper machine was his first big break. He set about making a series of improvements to Robert’s prototype, removing the vat from below the wire and eventually replacing the hand-operated crankshaft with a mechanical drive. The first improved Fourdrinier machine was set up at Frogmore Mill in Hertfordshire in 1803, and remains the effective template for all modern paper machines: a moving belt made of wire mesh has stock poured onto it, water drains through the mesh, leaving a fibrous sheet, which is cut into sections and hung out to dry, as indeed were the Fourdriniers, who had poured money into the enterprise and found themselves bankrupt by 1810, having made a net loss on the machine of over £50,000, though years later Parliament granted them some small compensation for ‘being reduced to comparative poverty in the evening of a long life spent in the execution of a great national object’.

The great national object did not meet, however, with universal acclaim. As it was for the mighty Fourdriniers, so it was for the lowly workers, only more so: the machines stole not their capital but their livelihoods. More and better machines meant that fewer and less-skilled people needed to be employed. The machine became an enemy. During the Swing riots that spread throughout England in 1830 a number of paper mills were attacked – in Norfolk, Wiltshire, Worcestershire and Buckinghamshire. Most of those involved seem to have been members of the Original Society of Papermakers, who were furious and fearful for their futures. But, alas, the riots solved nothing. Several paper manufacturers went out of business, and those workers who were tried and found guilty were transported to Tasmania. The march of the machines continued.

Progress was relentless. The cylinder machine – using a revolving brass cylinder that was part submerged in the pulp vat – had been patented by another Englishman, John Dickinson, in 1809, and on 29 November 1814 The Times became the first newspaper printed on such a machine. In 1820 Thomas Bonsor Crompton was granted a patent for drying cylinders, which meant paper no longer had to be hung to dry. In 1824 John Dickinson was granted another patent – he was, with Bryan Donkin, one of the great paper pioneers – this time for a machine that pasted paper together to form a kind of cardboard. In 1825 the first ‘dandy roll’ was developed, so-called because on seeing it in action workers at the mills apparently exclaimed ‘What a dandy!’ It was used to press watermarks into machine-made paper. A Fourdrinier machine – built by Donkin in England – was set up in America in 1827. In 1830 bleach was introduced into the process of turning rags into paper. In 1840 Friedrich Gottlob Keller, a weaver and reed-binder in Saxony, patented a wood-grinding machine, making mass paper production possible. Christmas cards, photographs, adhesive postage stamps and paper bags all began to be produced during the 1840s and 1850s, and by 1900 there were machine-made cigarette papers, tracing papers, cups, plates, collars, cuffs, napkins, tissues and almost every other imaginable paper product. With the first commercial production of corrugated cardboard boxes around the turn of the century – making it possible for paper safely to send itself to itself by itself – the Age of Paper had reached its zenith.

Watermarks: the equivalent of an artisan’s trade-mark

It all began in China, of course, many years ago, and it continues in China still, where the political, economic and cultural significance of paper can’t be overestimated: traditional prayers are still written on paper and burned; traditional paper kites are still flown; and traditional cut paper is still used to decorate shrines. More importantly, the Chinese paper industry is now booming and grinding in the same way it boomed in Europe and America in the nineteenth century, with a consolidation of production into large-scale mills and a move away from the use of recycled material towards the use of wood pulp (largely imported from Russia) to feed the country’s burgeoning appetite for brand spanking new Western-style packaged consumer goods, mail-order catalogues, newspapers, magazines and paper money. It’s possible, as some scholars have suggested, that paper was not originally a Chinese invention, and that the Khanzadas people, from Tizara in the Alwar district of Rajasthan in India, first made it from cellulose fibres sometime in the third century BC. Or maybe the Aztecs. Or the Mayans. It’s also possible that the Chinese did not invent printing, gunpowder and the compass. But even if they didn’t invent them, they may as well have done: they did invent banknotes, and cannonballs, and manned flight with kites, and numerous astronomical instruments; whether or not they got there first with the four great inventions, they were certainly early adopters. In August 2006 at Dunhuang, in the Gansu province of north-western China, an important town on the ancient Silk Road and the site of numerous archaeological discoveries over the past hundred years, flax paper was discovered that dates back to the Western Han Dynasty (202 BC– 220 AD), meaning that paper may have been in use at least two hundred years before the oft-cited date of 105 AD, when T’sai Lun, the Shang Fang Si, the officer in charge of the Emperor’s weapons and instruments, is said to have first reported its invention.

From Dunhuang it is possible to chart the vast westward drift of paper, like a slow-moving landslide. Plotted by significant sites of paper production, and going from right to left, the paper trail flows majestically over about a five-hundred-year period, first from China to Samarkand, and then to north Africa (Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, Fes), before moving on to Europe between the tenth and twelfth centuries (Xativa, Fabriano, Troyes, Nuremberg, Krakow, Moscow). By the fifteenth century pulp tech had even washed up in England: John Tate established the first paper mill in Britain, in Hertfordshire, in 1495. Legend has it – a legend derived from an old Arabic manuscript, Roots of Trades and Kingdoms – that papermaking began its long journey to the west at a battle in AD 751 at the River Talas (Tharaz/Taraz), about five hundred miles east of Samarkand, at which Arab armies, victorious over the Chinese, seized some papermakers as prisoners, who promised to reveal the secrets of papermaking in exchange for their freedom.

True or not, by the end of the eighth century the Sogdian Arabs had certainly taken to papermaking, and paper had taken to them: they had become, like us, paper people. The first paper factory opened in Baghdad in 793–94, and under the Abbasid caliphate, the great Islamic Golden Age, the city became a centre of learning with its own unique paper market, consisting of shops and stalls, fueling and fulfilling the great demand for paper by the city’s artists, philosophers and scientists. By the ninth century paper was being produced in Damascus, in Hama, and in Tripoli, and by the end of the tenth century the skills and knowledge of papermaking, carried by Muslim scribes and texts, had spread through Tunisia, Mauritania and Morocco, arriving in Spain around 950 AD. The production and manufacture of paper, if not its actual invention, might therefore be said to be one of Islam’s many gifts to the West (the word ‘ream’, as the great scholar of Islamic papermaking, Jonathan Bloom, points out, derives from the Arabic word for ‘bundle’). Though it was not a gift that was always warmly received, even by the most foresighted and discerning: in 1221 the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, bald and brilliant, known as the stupor mundi, the wonder of the world, issued a decree declaring that all documents written on paper were invalid; they would not last; they were ephemeral. Some scholars have speculated that the stupor mundi may have been under pressure from sheep and cattle breeders who were fearful of losing the market for parchment. Or maybe Frederick was just not so stupor after all. Either way, the decree came too late: paper was the future. Parchment was yesterday’s news.

So from China to the Arab world, and through the Byzantine Empire into Christian Europe, paper made its slow procession – and slow precisely because hand papermaking was a slow process. It was also cold, hard work: for the vatman, who dipped the mould into the vat, and lifted it out, allowing the water to drain; for the coucher, who removed the wet sheet from the mould and laid it on felt; and for the layman, who stacked and pressed the sheets and hung them to dry, sheet after sheet after endless weary sheet. And this is not to mention all the other equally backbreaking and even less glamorous tasks: before the invention by the Dutch of the so-called Hollander beater in the early eighteenth century there was the shredding and beating of the rags for the pulp; and the dipping of the finished sheets in sizing; and the polishing of the pages by hand, or calendering them between rollers; the eternal smoothing out of ridges and wrinkles. Dard Hunter, who knew papermaking from the inside out, and the outside in – as both a scholar and a practitioner of the craft, and as the founder of his own paper mill, and a paper museum, and the author of one-man books, The Etching of Figures (1916) and The Etching of Contemporary Life (1917), for which he made the paper, and designed and cut and cast the typeface, and etched the pictures and wrote the words – believed that papermakers needed unusually robust constitutions because ‘the constant stooping posture, combined with the heat of the paper stock in the vat, caused them to grow old prematurely … at fifty many of these hard-working craftsmen appeared to have reached the allotted threescore years and ten’.

And yet despite all these hardships, traditions of hand papermaking still survive. Gandhi famously demonstrated papermaking at the 1938 Haripura Congress, and ancient methods of Indian papermaking are still maintained in a town called Sanganer, near Jaipur, where all the paper is chemical-free, sun-dried, unbleached and naturally coloured. In Nepal, hand-made lotka paper is still made from the bark of daphne trees. And in Japan there will always be washi. ‘Why is washi so wholesome?’ asks Soetsu Yanagi, co-founder of the Japan Folk Art Society. ‘When we try to figure it out, we cannot help but think it is because nature is paper’s mother and tradition paper’s father.’ And England? In England, the Exotic Paper Company of Chilcompton, Somerset, makes a paper using elephant dung from Woburn Safari Park.

Meanwhile, in the giant paper mills, the machines grind on, the woodchips stewing in their alkali solutions, and the top-secret pulp recipes crying out like addicts at a meth clinic for their chemical additives. A recent Handbook of Toxicology and Ecotoxicology for the Pulp and Paper Industry (2001) lists more than thirty common compounds that are used to make paper: acrylamide monomer; alkenyl succinic anhydride; alkyl ketene dimer wax dispersant; aluminium sulphate; aniline green dye; anionic polyurethane; azo dye anionic; azo dye cationic; bentonite; bronopol-type biocide; calcium polyacrylamide; cationic starch; chlorine; colloidal silica sol; defoamer; fluorescent whitening agents; hydrochloric acid; hydrogen peroxide; N-methylisothiazolinone-type biocide; polyaluminium hydroxide chloride; polyamide amine epichlorohydrin resin; polyamine; polyethylenimine; rosin size dispersant; sodium chlorate; sodium dithionite; sodium hydroxide; sodium silicate; stearic acid; and styrene/acrylate copolymer. These are the chemicals and dyes that give paper the strength and the whiteness we so admire and desire. They are applied in two ways: either blended with the stock, to fill and load the space between the wood-pulp cellulose fibres, laid down like fatty-tissue deposits or little Botox-boosts; or sprayed and applied as coatings, like permatan, or varnish. When you pick up a book – when you hold a piece of paper – what you have in your hand is no natural product, no emanation of mind. It is the product of two thousand years of continual beating, dipping and drying. It is a testament to human industry and ingenuity – a miracle of inscrutable intricacy.

Hand-made fibrous paper incorporating leaves

Like poor blind Oedipus, my fate was sealed long ago, but I have only now solved the riddle, have only now found the path. In the late 1970s and early 1980s even the most non-selective and non-academic of secondary schools in England began offering a kind of rudimentary careers advice to pupils. At the end of the fifth year we were invited to meet with a teacher – let’s call him Tiresias – who had been entrusted with running the new-fangled punched-card careers guidance system. We had to answer various questions, and the cards on which our answers had been entered were fed into the school’s computer – an Oracle? – which eventually delivered its verdict on a till-type print-out. And so we children of Essex were taught to aim for careers as secretaries, receptionists, cabbies and mechanics. I was lucky. My destiny, apparently, was to work in forestry. Youth Training Schemes were available.

Thirty years later, and having barely set foot in a forest since, except for the occasional hike and adventure in Epping Forest, and in the fictional woods and groves of Greek myth and Arthurian Romance, as well as in the Hundred Acre Wood, and Where the Wild Things Are and The Gruffalo, I realise that I am in fact up to my neck in the leafy depths, drowning in the loam. Not a forester, but certainly a child of the forest, a denizen of the dusky dells and ferny floors. Wood is my fuel: this morning alone I came home with two reams of copier paper, two Silvine reporter’s notebooks, some gummed envelopes, five HB pencils, a Belfast Telegraph, a Daily Telegraph, a Guardian, The Times, a Daily Mail, The World of Interiors and Boxing Monthly. And I’d only gone into the shop for some stamps. I consume more paper, pound for pound, than any other product, food included. I am a paper omnivore. I devour it: any kind, from anywhere. (Or almost anywhere: in London recently I wandered absentmindedly into Smythson, the high-class stationers on Bond Street, one of those shops where the staff are even better-looking than the customers, who are anyway better-looking than anyone you’ve ever met, and where there are security guards on the door, and where a nice brown leather stationery bureau will set you back £1,500, and where the notebooks can be gold-embossed with lettering of your choice, and where, realistically, I couldn’t even afford a pack of cedar pencils.)

And of course, when I scribble and print on my piles and piles of virgin white paper with my Faber-Castell pencils and my decidedly non-state-of-the-art Hewlett Packard scanner-copier-printer, what I’m really doing is taking a big double-headed felling axe and laying it unto the root. Now I am become Death, the destroyer of … woods. If a ream of paper is roughly equivalent to 5 per cent of a tree – though such figures are notoriously difficult to calculate and verify – then at approximately twenty reams’ worth of notes, or eight thousand sheets, the book you are currently holding in your hands is the product of at least one entire tree, though that’s not including all the paper books that were read and consumed in its production, nor the paper used for its own printing and publication: the gross product cost far exceeds the one tree, and is probably at least a small copse. The world’s great forests are not in Canada, Russia or the Amazon basin: they are in bookshops, bookshelves and Amazon warehouses all over the world.

As soon as one begins to investigate and explore how and why we have made trees into paper one finds oneself in deeply troubling Oedipus territory – ignorant, blind, doomed as a despoiler – or perhaps more like Dante at the beginning of the Inferno, ‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita/mi ritrovai per una selva oscura/che la diritta via era smarrita’ (‘In the middle of the journey of our life/I found myself in a dark forest,/where the straight way was lost’). The poet Ciaran Carson translates Dante’s famous ‘selva oscura’ as ‘gloomy wood’: in tracing the history of modern paper manufacturing, the gloom at times seems overwhelming and all-encompassing, like the sudden approach of night, or like Malcolm’s army advancing towards Dunsinane at the end of Macbeth, creeping up unsuspected, camouflaged by boughs cut from the Great Birnam wood (a scene brilliantly, darkly depicted in Kurosawa’s 1957 film adaptation of the play, Throne of Blood: see YouTube). Light turns first to shadow and then to inescapable dark.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, paper manufacturers began to search for new papermaking materials. There were simply not enough rags to go around: in 1800, Britain imported £200,000 worth of foreign rags for papermaking, and prices were rocketing. In the words of Dard Hunter, author of the unsurpassable Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft (1943), what was required was ‘a vegetable fibre in compact form, easily gathered and handled and furnishing the highest average yield per acre of growth’. Wood was the obvious answer, and a man named Matthias Koops – mapmaker, bankrupt and inventor – came up with a quick solution. In 1800

An example from G. F. Smith & Sons Ltd, paper and envelope makers, of the fibre content of their business envelopes (courtesy G. F. Smith & Sons Ltd)

Koops published the magnificently titled Historical Account of the Substances Which have been Used to Convey Ideas from the Earliest Date to the Invention of Paper, in which he claimed that some of the pages of the book were of ‘Paper made from wood alone, the product of this country, without any intermixture of rags, waste paper, bark, straw or any other vegetable substance, from which paper might be, or has hitherto been manufactured; and of this the most ample testimony can be given’.

Testimony was indeed forthcoming, for during 1800 and 1801 Koops was granted a number of patents for paper manufacturing, including one ‘for manufacturing paper from straw, hay, thistles, waste and refuse of hemp and flax, and different kinds of wood and bark’. Attracting investors to his alternative paper-manufacturing project, Koops built a vast paper mill in London, at Westminster – the grim sight of which the William Blake scholar Keri Davies believes may have influenced Blake’s apocalyptic vision of industrialisation in his prophetic book, The Four Zoas – but within a year Koops’s creditors had closed in on him again, and by 1804 the mill had been sold off, and it was left to others to profit from paper made from wood. These others included Friedrich Gottlob Keller, the German weaver who was granted the patent for a wood-grinding machine in 1840, a machine which was then developed by Heinrich Voelter and imported to America by Albrecht Pagenstecher, founder of the first ground-wood pulp mill in the United States. Chemical wood-pulping processes, which stew wood rather than grind it – using either alkali, in the soda process, or acid, in the sulphite process – were developed during the same period, and by the mid-nineteenth century the West’s potential paper crisis had been averted: raw-material costs had fallen, production had increased, demand worldwide exploded. The Age of Paper had truly begun. Wood had saved paper.

And paper, in turn, has destroyed wood. Today, almost half of all industrially felled wood is pulped for paper, and according to green campaigners our uncontrollable appetite for the white stuff has become a threat to the entire blue planet. In medieval Britain special courts and inquisitions were held to hear the ‘pleas of the forest’, with tenants and foresters being summoned for breaches of the forest laws, including damage to timber and the poaching of venison. In a contemporary reversal of these forest eyres, activists and campaigners now call upon multinational paper companies to account for their forest-management crimes.

One of the angriest and most eloquent among the modern-day forest pleaders is the writer and activist Mandy Haggith, who argues that ‘We need to unlearn our perception of a blank page as clean, safe and natural and see it for what it really is: chemically bleached tree-mash.’ According to Haggith and many others – groups such as ForestEthics, the Dogwood Alliance and the Natural Resources Defense Council – modern papermaking has had devastating human and environmental consequences: in short and in summary, as well as causing soil erosion, flooding, and the widespread extinction of habitats and species, it has also caused poverty, social conflict, and is leading us on a long and inexorable paper trail to world apocalypse, via self-destruction. The few giant global companies that dominate the paper industry – International Paper, Georgia-Pacific, Weyerhaeuser, Kimberly-Clark – are accused of razing ancient forests, replacing them with monoculture plantations that are dependent upon chemical-based fertilisers, and polluting rivers and lakes with their industrial by-products.

The charge sheet is long and complicated, but even if the paper companies could acquit themselves entirely, and wood resources were inexhaustible, and all forests forever sustainably managed, paper manufacturing would still pose a threat to the world’s future, because the mass industrial production processes use so many other finite resources, including water, minerals, metals and fuels. ‘Making a single sheet of A4 paper,’ according to Haggith, ‘not only causes as much greenhouse gas emissions as burning a lightbulb for an hour, it also uses a mugful of water.’ (Industry figures suggest that it takes about forty thousand litres of water to make a tonne of paper, though much of that water is recycled.) With our delicious, decadent daily diet of newspapers, magazines, Post-it notes, toilet and kitchen rolls, we are guzzling down gallons of water and eating up electricity: we have grown fat and become obese on paper. In the UK, average annual paper consumption per person is around two hundred kg; in America it’s closer to three hundred kg; and in Finland – whose paper industry accounts for 15 per cent of the world’s total production – it’s even more. Consumption in China is currently a mere fifty kg per person, but gaining fast. World paper consumption is now approaching a million tonnes per day – and most of this, after its short useful life, ends up in landfill. One way or another, and indisputably according to Haggith, ‘We treat paper with utter contempt.’

Which is odd, because we absolutely love trees. In fact, we worship them – not dendrologists, but dendrolators. In The Golden Bough (1890), that massive, mad compendium of myths and rituals, James Frazer has a whole chapter on the worship of trees, listing rituals for just about every human and non-human experience, from birth to marriage to death and rebirth, ad infinitum. The Golden Bough is of course itself named after the story from the Aeneid, in which Aeneas and the Sibyl are required to present a golden bough to Charon, in order to cross the river Styx and thus gain access, through Limbo and Tartarus, to the Elysian Fields, where Aeneas is reunited with his father, Anchises. Trees grant us access to underworlds and other worlds also in Norse mythology, with Yggdrasil, the World Tree, a giant ash which connects all the worlds, and from which Odin is sacrificed by being hanged, before being resurrected and granted the gift of divine sight. Stories of special, sacred and cosmic trees abound in religion, in history and in legend: Augustine is converted under a fig tree; Newton is inspired under an apple tree; the Buddha under the Bo tree; Wordsworth ‘under this dark sycamore’, composing ‘Tintern Abbey’; and in the eighteenth century a large elm tree in Boston, the so-called Liberty Tree, became the symbol of resistance to British rule over the American colonies.

If the tree is a site of personal enlightenment and a symbol of emancipation, then woods and forests are places of enchantment that can and often do represent entire peoples, nations, and indeed the world as a whole. In Andrew Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax’ (1651), for example, often read as an allegory on the English Civil War, the narrator takes ‘sanctuary in the wood’, where ‘The arching boughs unite between/The columns of temple green’ – the wood as a place of safety where one can take stock, rethink and re-imagine. Similarly, in Italo Calvino’s fabulous novel The Baron in the Trees (1957), set in Liguria in the eighteenth century, the young Baron Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò climbs up into a tree in order to escape his tormenting family and to gain perspective on the world: he likes it so much up there that he decides to stay.

A yearning for arboreal existence is no mere fairytale – although it is also, often, a fairytale (the tales of the Brothers Grimm, for example, feature a veritable forest of forests, so much so that they might be said to grow not from German folktales but direct from German soil). An extraordinary number of recent books celebrate trees and woodlands in near mystical fashion. Colin Tudge, in The Secret Life of Trees: How They Live and Why They Matter (2005), argues that ‘without trees our species would not have come into being at all’. Richard Mabey, in Beechcombings: The Narratives of Trees (2007), sees trees as witnesses to human history, ‘dense with time’. And Roger Deakin, in Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees (2007), provides a personal account of how trees teach us about ourselves and each other, the forest not as a mirror to nature, but the mirror of nature. ‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,’ proclaimed Thoreau, long ago, in Walden, Or Life in the Woods (1854), ‘to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.’

And here perhaps lies the source of our contemporary guilt and confusion about turning trees into paper; here is the heart of the sylvan darkness. It’s not that we can’t see the wood for the trees: we can’t even see the trees. When we gaze into the forest mirror we see ourselves. The anthropologist Maurice Bloch, in an article, ‘Why Trees, Too, are Good to Think With: Towards an Anthropology of the Meaning of Life’ (1998), argues that ‘the symbolic power of trees comes from the fact that they are good substitutes for humans’. Are we human? Or are we dryad? In the growth and maturation of a tree we are reminded of the growth and maturation of a person. In tree parts, for better and for worse, we see body parts: branches, limbs; leaves, hair; bark, skin; trunk, torso; sap, blood. Lavinia, in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, has her hands, ‘her two branches’, ‘loppd’ and ‘hew’d’; in his poem ‘Tree at my Window’, Robert Frost has Fate put man and tree together, ‘Your head so much concerned with outer/Mine with inner, weather’. Living trees clearly symbolise the regeneration and continuation of human life: the transformation of wood into paper is therefore a kind of self-annihilation, a diabolical transformation, the reverse of the transformation of the wine into the blood of Christ during Mass. Black Mass = white sheet. In one of the most extraordinary passages about tree worship in the whole of The Golden Bough, Frazer writes:

How serious the worship was in former times may be gathered from the ferocious penalty appointed by the old German laws for such as dared to peel the bark of a standing tree. The culprit’s navel was to be cut out and nailed to a part of the tree which he had peeled and he was to be driven round and round the tree until all his guts were wound around its trunk. The intention of the punishment clearly was to replace the dead bark by a living substitute; it was a life for a life, the life of a man for the life of a tree.

Such narratives and fantasies of punishment and self-punishment characterise much contemporary Western nature writing, which often reads like an experiment in narcissism, in that true sense of Narcissus being unable to distinguish between himself and his reflection. The theoretical branch of nature writing is a form of literary criticism called ecopoetics (from the Greek ‘oikos’, home or dwelling place, and ‘poiesis’, ‘making’), which wrestles with difficult issues of selfhood and self-sufficiency. According to Jonathan Bate, one of the most brilliant proponents of ecopoetics, ‘our inner ecology cannot be sustained without the health of ecosystems’. In his book The Song of the Earth (2000), a tour de force, or at least a tour de chant, Bate argues that ‘The dream of deep ecology will never be realized upon the earth, but our survival as a species may be dependent on our capacity to dream it in the work of our imagination.’ The means by which we might do this, according to Bate, borrowing his terms from the American poet Gary Snyder and the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, is to understand works of art as ‘imaginary states of nature, imaginary ideal ecosystems, and by reading them, by inhabiting them, we can start to imagine what it might be like to live differently upon the earth’. In a riddling conclusion to his book, Bate writes that ‘If mortals dwell in that they save the earth and if poetry is the original admission of dwelling, then poetry is the place where we save the earth.’

Book plate of Erich Saffert, Doctor of Agriculture and Forestry Surveying, Austria, early twentieth century (courtesy Sieglinde Robinson)

Bad news: poetry is probably not the place where we will save the earth. And there is probably little evidence either for Bate’s contention that ‘mortals dwell in that they save the earth’. Mortals dwell, rather – or certainly have dwelt – in that they use the earth, from the Romans and the Saxons clearing British woodland for developing iron-smelting works, to the development of Forstwissenschaft (forest science) in Germany, where algebra and geometry combined to produce a kind of mathematics of the forest, by which foresters could calculate volumes of wood and timber and therefore plan for felling and replanting. Ecopoetics yearns for oneness with the natural world, but all of our experience suggests that separation from nature – domination, despoliation – is the norm.

So how to continue in this difficult relationship? How to find our way through the gloom? How to dwell with forests and with paper? Might we perhaps restrict ourselves solely to rotefallen, or wyndfallen wood, so-called cablish (from the Latin ‘cableicium’, or ‘cablicium’), in order to provide ourselves with fuel and with fibre for our books? Should we all become little Thoreaus, building cabins from small white pines? Perhaps we should further investigate alternatives to wood pulp in paper production – alternatives which include sustainable crops such as hemp, straw, flax and kenaf? At the very least we should respect our paper – if nothing else, as a sign of respect for ourselves.

Woodcut map printed on paper, sixteenth century

Redrawn from Capability Brown’s plan for Burghley House

© The Omnipotent Magician, Jane Brown, Chatto & Windus

‘Maps are drawn by men and not turned out automatically by machines,’ wrote the geographer J.K. Wright in his classic essay ‘Map Makers are Human’ in 1942. Times have changed: these days, maps are turned out automatically by machines, or at least by humans using machines known as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), the computer hardware and software that’s used to capture, store and display geographical and topographical data and which, according to one standard introduction to GIS, ‘is changing the world and almost everything in it’. Computer mapping systems were first developed by the Canadian government and then at Harvard University during the 1960s, and by now we’re all accustomed to maps that we can simply download, pinch, zoom and click rather than scribble on, fold and leave to rot at the bottom of a rucksack: atlases at our fingertips, giant globes in our pockets. Logically, the paper map should already be consigned to the glove compartment of history. But it isn’t.

This may be due to the fact that people simply like the look and feel of paper maps – with some people of course liking the look and feel of them much more than others. In 2006, a man called Edward Forbes Smiley III was jailed for stealing more than a hundred maps, worth $3 million, from collections at Yale, Harvard and the British Library. Smiley sliced the maps out of books using a razor blade, in much the same fashion as another famous map thief, Gilbert Bland, an antiques dealer from Florida, apparently as unassuming as his name, who was in fact, according to his biographer, the ‘Al Capone of cartography’ – though without the violence, bootlegging, bribery and late-stage neurosyphilis. Bland, like Smiley, was really just a petty thief with a taste for antique paper.

So why do people steal maps? For the same reason they steal money and books, of course: because they’re paper marked with symbols that make them valuable. But perhaps more especially, people steal maps because a map is a symbol of conquest, so the theft of a map somehow represents the ultimate conquest: the possession of the means of possession, as it were. At least, that’s my theory. No gangster mapper, I have to admit that the temptation to snaffle old paper maps has occasionally been all but overwhelming: the seventeenth-century, gold-enriched, handcoloured, multi-tinted maps issued by Willem Janszoon Blaeu and sons, for example, on display in the Dutch Maritime Museum in Amsterdam, are so extraordinary and so exquisite that only the most dimly pixel-fixated could fail to feel the stirrings of desire (Blaeu had to design and build his own printing presses in order to produce work of such quality). Or the maps produced by Christopher Saxton under the authority of Queen Elizabeth in the sixteenth century, the first ever maps of the English counties, beautiful, simple, restrained, lovingly hand-crafted by engravers and artists imported from the map-pioneering Low Countries, and popularly reproduced on playing cards. Or John Seller’s seventeenth-century sea charts: full-fathom masterpieces. Or the maps of the great Sanson family of France – no relation – whose work, in the words of one authority, was ‘always dignified and attractive, with an ornamental cartouche’. If only.

Even my own modest collection of Half-Inch Bartholomew maps, with their tweedy Edinburgh elegance, have a kind of satisfying thickness to them, a fullness, like a wooden jigsaw puzzle, or an old Bakelite radio, a reminder that things were somehow heavier and thicker, more substantial, in the old days. The past always seems to weigh more – because often it did. My Bartholomew maps, some of them over a hundred years old and of printed paper mounted on linen, barely show their age except for a little fraying at the edges, and still sit sturdily in the hand on long hikes, like Arthur Wainwright’s ubiquitous pipe, or a greaseproof wrap of sandwiches. It just seems natural to find one’s way using a printed map – presumably because for centuries people have indeed navigated their way with paper, so we have become accustomed to them guiding us towards our destination: map-reading another of our many ingrained paper habits. In an article in the Journal of Environmental Psychology in 2008, ‘Wayfinding with a GPS-Based Mobile Navigation System: A Comparison with Maps and Direct Experience’, Dr Toru Ishikawa, a cognitive-behavioural geographer at the University of Tokyo, found that pedestrians using GPS devices made more errors than those using paper maps (but that people using paper maps made more errors than those who were shown the route in person). Dr Ishikawa has also studied how people view art in museums using both audio-visual aids and traditional guidebooks and floorplans: those using the new technology tend to forget what they’ve seen quicker than those using the traditional guides. Good old paper, man’s best friend, trotting along beside us like a faithful retriever.

It can even be relied upon in virtual realms. In the Super Mario series of video games, for example – which includes the excellent Paper Mario, Super Paper Mario, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, and the spin-off Mario and Luigi series – part of the appeal and attraction is not only that Mario can fold up into a paper plane, and a paper boat, feats which are of course excellent and impressive in themselves, but also that he often navigates the bewildering virtual world with a trusty map in his white-gloved hand: an intrepid moustachioed explorer, Mario is also our guide. For home-made Mario-style mapping, an Italian self-styled ‘jedi architect and media master’ called Iacopo Boccalari has created a simple method for turning dull on-screen Google Maps into paper-looking on-screen Google maps (see www.iacopoboccalari.com), while MapsOnPaper.com, run by a Swedish design agency, will transform a screen-friendly map into a printer-friendly format. Paper remains the ghost in the machine. Metaphorically.

Literally. Recently, the increased availability of open-source data and mapping tools has allowed people to make their own maps: in the now customary Web 2.0 fashion, map consumers have become map producers. This new kind of map-making is sometimes called neo-cartography, and in 2004 a man called Steve Coast became one of the first digital neo-cartographers when he created something called OpenStreetMap (OSM), the Wikipedia of maps. Using a cheap hand-held GPS device, Coast set out to create a map that could be made freely available, without copyright restrictions, and that could be added to and edited by others. In the words of its mission statement, OpenStreetMap is ‘dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data and to providing geospatial data for anybody to use and share’. What’s amazing is that the using and sharing of geospatial data via OSM still requires paper in order to work effectively. Not everyone has the cutting-edge digital tools or cartographic instincts or training to be able to add meaningful details to digital maps, so various methods of contributing to OSM maps have quickly evolved, including the so-called Walking Papers method, which allows people to print OSM maps on paper, add details to them with a pen, and then scan them back onto the map using the OSM web-based software. It’s easy: we’re all neo-cartographers now. And, crucially, it isn’t just a hobby for wannabe geographers.

Map illustrating a historical event

Kibera is a massive slum in Nairobi, Kenya: estimates of its population range from 200,000 to more than a million. In 2008 the independent Map Kibera Project, organised by an Italian academic, Stefano Marras, began mapping Kibera using the Walking Papers method, with the aim of producing reliable, up-to-date maps for use by the inhabitants of this ever-changing city. Local children are trained in basic GPS technology, in order to be able to capture the geographical data of an area using handheld devices, and organisers and volunteers then print off A1-size maps using this data so that others can then use tracing paper and sets of coloured markers to add important details such as the location of markets, sewers, pathways and streams. This marked-up paper map is then photographed and copied to a computer, the original map is updated, and large numbers of the maps printed for distribution: a dynamic digital-paper-digital-paper flow.

This collaborative, hybrid form of digital/paper mapping has also been used successfully in disaster zones: in 2010 in the Pakistan floods, after the Christchurch earthquake in 2011, and currently in Haiti. Arguably there has been no enterprise quite like it since the English Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) produced their cheap maps for working people – sold for a shilling – in the early to mid-1800s, and even then there was of course no sense in which the readers of the SDUK maps were also the producers. The hierarchical model of geographical data collection and distribution may have changed, but paper still has a role to play in the digital era: machines may make maps, but machines still run on paper.

Between the first maps being drawn in the sand and the new Golden Age of Google and OSM neo-cartography there have been centuries of men and women making maps not only on paper but on just about any kind of material, including stone, wood, and in the famous case of Charlemagne, plates of solid silver. Everyone knows that the first printed map in the Western world appeared in a 1472 edition of the dictionary of St Isidore of Seville, and everyone knows it was the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator who in the late sixteenth century began making maps using a projection based on latitude and longitude (the considerable advantage of which is that it makes navigation easier, the considerable disadvantage of which is that it makes Greenland look bigger than China, and Europe bigger than South America). But not everyone knows the story of Mercator’s contemporary, Abraham Ortels, of Antwerp – printer, bookseller, print-dealer and ‘afsetter van carten’, decorator of maps – who was one of the first great entrepreneurial mapmakers, and who pipped Mercator to the post by creating the first modern paper atlas.

The story goes that sometime in the mid-1500s a rich Antwerp merchant was complaining to a friend about the state of contemporary maps: the big ones were too large and unwieldy, the small ones could hardly be read at all. How big were the big ones? They were enormous. Martin Waldseemüller’s Universalis Cosmographiae Descriptio in Plano, for example, published to accompany his Cosmographiae Introductio (1507) – which was, incidentally, the first map to bear the word ‘America’ – was printed on multiple sheets which, pasted together, would make a map of about thirty-six square feet. These days, algorithms are used in the design and folding of large maps, and these methods have in turn been used to develop three-dimensional objects which can be folded from flat sheets, with both flat-pack furniture and production-line car parts evolving from the mathematical rules for folding paper. But in sixteenth-century Antwerp there was no flat-pack furniture and there were no handy algorithms, so the merchant’s friend mentioned his complaint to a gifted young map illuminator, Abraham Ortels – known as Ortelius – to see if he could assist. Ortelius made up a volume of about thirty maps for the merchant, sensible and uniform in size, and being young and ambitious, he realised that there was more in this than just a one-off commission: this was his big opportunity. He began collecting and editing more maps, and engraving plates of his own, and had them printed and bound, and after a mere ten years of hard work, on 20 May 1570, the first edition of the first modern atlas was published. Its title: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World); seventy maps on fifty-three copper-plate printed sheets, thirty-five pages of text, price 6fl 10st. The Theatrum was really an amazing piece of art – Ortelius was friends with Peter Brueghel the Elder and was an early collector of the work of Dürer – but it was also profoundly practical. Portable, readable, reliable, affordable. A second edition was produced within three months, a Dutch edition in 1571, with other editions and supplements soon to follow: scholars have estimated total sales of around 7,750 copies of the full atlas in its first few years of publication. The first edition of Mercator’s combined atlas – incorporating all his maps – wasn’t published until 1602, and although it soon eclipsed the Theatrum in popularity, Ortelius had got there first: the Theatrum is organised entirely as a modern atlas might be organised, beginning with a map of the world and continuing with maps of the continents, and then of various countries.

What followed this sixteenth-century revolution in mapping and map technology, in the words of Lloyd A. Brown, in The Story of Maps (1950), was ‘the greatest real estate venture of all time’. During the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, paper maps allowed groups and individuals not only to navigate, but also, crucially, to make plans for navigations and adventures, both great and small. What’s true for countries is true also for country estates. Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, for example, was so-called because he could see the capabilities in a landscape; he could read it like a document, or a map. Explaining his method of garden design, Hannah More famously recounted how Brown would point a finger and announce, ‘“I make a comma and there,” pointing to another spot, “where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon; at another part, where an interruption is desirable to break the view, a parenthesis; now a full stop, and then I begin another subject.”’ Using maps and surveys, estates could be managed, trees planted, and grand visions and ideas put into practice.

Over the past five hundred years, paper has helped to create and define landscapes, peoples and nations. Maps have assisted and determined the colonial and military explorations of the Dutch, and the French, the commercial activities of the British East India Company, and countless other enterprises. (And as with space, so time was also colonised using paper, in the form of timelines, timetables, astronomical charts, genealogies and succession lists – among the most famous and elaborate of which is the massive triumphal arch, the Ehrenpforte, designed on paper by Dürer for Maximilian I around 1516, which consists of forty-five giant folded plates.) At home as well as abroad, maps defined and legitimated places: rulers who could literally see and grasp their territories could define and defend them. The work of the Ordnance Survey, for example, begun in 1791, was a survey for the British Board of Ordnance, undertaken following the successful use of maps in the Scottish Highlands after the crushing of the Jacobite rebellion at Culloden in 1746. But it’s not all bad news. It’s not all about subjugation. If a map is a visual statement and argument about the world and our place in it – announcing both ‘I am here’ and ‘You are there’ – it can be used for good as well as for ill.

In the nineteenth century, Charles Booth famously used maps to illustrate his campaigning work on behalf of the London poor, with his street maps with their seven-colour system, from black, ‘inhabited principally by occasional labourers, loafers, and semi-criminals’ to yellow, inhabited by wealthy families who kept ‘three or more servants’. (My own family, I note, are from the black streets.) In the 1970s, Stuart McArthur’s upside-down ‘Universal Corrective Map of the World’, which shows Australia on top, became a form of national self-assertion, and the famous Peters projection, which shows all countries and continents with their relative sizes maintained, unlike Mercator’s projection, became a challenge not just to cartographers but to the international community: now that you can see the size of Africa, what are you going to do about it? In J.H. Andrews’ pithy summation, in Maps in Those Days: Cartographic Methods Before 1850 (2009), ‘Maps express beliefs about the surface of the earth’ – and, one would want to add, its inhabitants. When HMS Beagle set out from England on 27 December 1831, with a young naturalist named Charles Robert Darwin along for the ride, it was on a cartographic mission, its aim to chart South American coastlines: it returned five years later with the beginnings of a new map of human civilisation.

The map historian R.A. Skelton summarises the power and role of maps thus: ‘In the political field, maps served for the demarcation of frontiers; in the economic, for property assessment and taxation, and (eventually) as an inventory of national resources; in administration, for communications in military affairs, for both strategic and military planning, offensive and defensive.’ Maps are an integral part of that vast sub-strata of paper that underpins and still underlies the modern world, a system, in the words of the radical geographer Denis Wood, that includes ‘codes, laws, ledgers, contracts, treaties, indices, covenants, deals, agreements’. Modernity was created by, sustained by, and remains saturated in paper.

Smothered by it also. One of the traditional challenges of mapping is how to represent that which is basically a sphere on a flat surface, an example of the perennial and troubling problem of the relationship between any object and its representation. In 1931 the philosopher Alfred Korzybski delivered a paper, ‘A Non-Aristotelian System and its Necessity for Rigor in Mathematics and Physics’, at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in which he remarked that ‘a map is not the territory’. But what if it were? What if a map were so accurate that it was the territory? What if the representation were perfect? In a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, ‘On Exactitude in Science’ (1946), a cartography-obsessed empire produces a 1:1 map, but then, over time, ‘Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome.’ The giant map is left to rot, though fragments of it are to be found sheltering ‘an occasional Beast or beggar’. We are Borges’ beasts and beggars still, for all the advances in digital technology, still wrapping ourselves in paper and its representations, still struggling to distinguish between maps and the territory, still hoping against hope that our paper guide has strong folding properties, is water repellent, abrasion resistant, and will sit sturdily in the hand on a long journey. Or perhaps that’s only me.

The Iron Curtain

Hand-made comb-marbled paper by Ann Muir

A page from Gutenberg’s forty-two-line Bible

At the beginning of his famous novel The Naked Lunch (1959), William Burroughs includes what he calls a ‘deposition: a testimony concerning a sickness’ (my copy of the book, a nice tight hardback, with original dust jacket, published by John Calder, was bought secondhand from an old junkshop in Chelmsford that I used to visit with schoolfriends at weekends in search of cheap paperback Beats, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus, and the Picador Richard Brautigan, and Borges, and Philip K. Dick). Burroughs is writing about his fifteen-year addiction to ‘junk’ – opium and all of its derivatives, including morphine, heroin, eukadol, pantopon, Demerol, palfium and a whole load of other stuff that he had variously smoked, eaten, sniffed, injected and inserted. ‘Junk,’ Burroughs writes, ‘is the ideal product … the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy … The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product … The addict … needs more and more junk to maintain a human form … [to] buy off the Monkey.’

The chances are, if you are reading this book, you are no better or worse than William S. Burroughs. The chances are, you have a serious problem: you’re an addict. You have been sold to a product. You have a monkey on your back. And that monkey is made of paper.

(But it’s OK. You are not alone. Here’s where I’m at: I am wearing a pair of dirty, brown, broken slip-on boots that my sister bought for me about ten years ago; in both boots the sole is split right across the middle, and I have attempted to fix them with super-glue. I have two other pairs of shoes, but they too are broken, too broken in fact for me to be able to patch up, and they have therefore required professional attention and are currently awaiting collection from the excellent boot and shoe repair shop – motto, ‘Shoes Good Enough To Wear Are Good Enough To Mend’ – just off Botanic Avenue in Belfast. I am wearing one of the shirts that the father of a friend of mine kindly sent me a few years ago, when he’d retired and was throwing out all his old work clothes and buying leisurewear. All of the shirts are made of a drip-dry nylon – Alagon – of a kind now unavailable for reasons not at all clear to me; you get used to the rashes after a while, and the benefit of not having to iron the shirts surely outweighs any slight skin complaint the material may cause. My trousers are one of the two wearable pairs that I’m currently running, and they’re in pretty good condition, although they are covered in green paint from a couple of summers ago when I was painting the shed where I work in the garden. My jacket is circa 1990. And I am standing in the War on Want bookshop, down at the other end of Botanic Avenue, ostensibly on my way home from work, and I have half a dozen books in my arms, and I know that if I blow all of my £20 spending money on these books I won’t be able to get my shoes back from the cobbler, and I’ll have to leave them there another week. They’ve already been in for a month, and the proprietor of the shop has started leaving messages for me on my answerphone. I have a decision to make. I buy the books. For the foreseeable future I shall continue to be dressing like a vaudeville comedian, or a character in a play by Samuel Beckett.)

The first documented use of the word bibliomania, according to my OED – the twenty-volume second edition, bought as a present to myself when I received the advance on my first novel, and which cost me the advance on my first novel, which meant effectively that I wrote a book to buy a book – was in 1734, in the Diary of Thomas Hearne

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