Paper
Page 3
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 November 29, 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 trademark
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 toward 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 fibers 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: 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 northwestern 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–AD 220), meaning that paper may have been in use at least two hundred years before the oft-cited date of AD 105, 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 center 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 AD 950. 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 mold into the vat, and lifted it out, allowing the water to drain; for the coucher, who removed the wet sheet from the mold 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 colored. In Nepal, handmade 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, cofounder 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 wood chips 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; aluminum sulfate; 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; polyaluminum 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 fibers, 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.
2
IN THE WOOD
“Wood” is an old name for forest. In the wood there are paths, mostly overgrown, that come to an abrupt stop where the wood is untrodden. They are called Holzwege. Each goes its separate way, though within the same forest. It often appears as if one is identical to another. But it only appears so. Woodcutters and forest keepers know these paths. They know what it means to be on a Holzweg.
MARTIN HEIDEGGER, Off the Beaten Track (1950)
Handmade fibrous paper incorporating leaves
Paper specification sample G F Smith & Sons Ltd.
Like that of 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 nonselective and nonacademic 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 newfangled 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 printout. 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 realize 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 writing desk will set you back £1,500 (approximately $2,440), 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 ax 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 percent 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 toward 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 (approximately $325,000) 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 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.”
An example from G. F. Smith & Sons Ltd., paper and envelope makers, of the fiber content of their business envelopes
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 industrialization 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 that was then developed by Heinrich Voelter and imported to America by Albrecht Pagenstecher, founder of the first groundwood 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 sulfite 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 fertilizers, and polluting rivers and lakes with their industrial by-products.