by Ian Sansom
And paper-made clothes. In England in the late nineteenth century an American music hall entertainer, Mr. Howard Paul, used to perform on stage wearing a paper suit, singing a song, “The Age of Paper,” by Henry Walker. The song goes like this:
In ev’ry shop one now espies
The last new thing is paper ties;
The coats of best blue wove are made;
But shirts, of course, are all cream laid.
A paper hat should you desire,
Or paper socks, say half a quire,
Or peg-tops of the last design—
You’ll get them all for three and nine!
For paper now is all the rage,
And nothing else will suit the age.
The closest thing to paper clothes actually having been all the rage happened in the late 1960s, when paper dresses had their brief but glorious fashion moment. In 1966 the Scott Paper Company offered a chemise-style dress for just $1, mail order, plus coupon: they sold 500,000 of them. Not to miss out, Hallmark soon began selling paper “hostess dresses,” designed to match a range of party napkins and tablecloths; and before you could say underpants there were evening dresses and wedding gowns, slippers, suits, raincoats and bikinis all being made if not entirely from paper, then at least from part paper, part nylon and rayon. One particularly eye- and spill-catching dress was advertised as the “Party Stopper,” a “Shimmering white mini with silver fringe, made of poly-plastic on Scott Dura-Weve paper. Wipe off and press again and again. $5.95 ppd.” Irresistible. According to an article in Time magazine in March 1967, “Real Live Paper Dolls,” paper clothing was so popular that one of America’s major manufacturers, Sterling Paper, was developing “paper resort wear,” so that holiday makers could leave their luggage at home and simply buy disposable clothes in their hotels. By June 1967 Mademoiselle magazine had as one of its cover stories “The Big Paper Craze”: “In terms of how much pow you get for your pennies, the paper dress is the ultimate smart-money fashion.”
The craze soon passed. But in Japan it never ended, because it had never begun: in the land where paper remains a thing of beauty as well as utility, paper clothes have always been a part of the culture. Kamiko, for example, is a robust kind of paper treated with starch that was often worn by priests and samurai during the Edo period (1603–1868), though the most famous wearer of kamiko was in fact a poet, or rather the poet, Bashō, who immortalized his outfits in his haiku, as Elvis hymned blue suede shoes and T. S. Eliot talked of turned-up trousers:
Japanese woodcut—paper garments
Shifu—not to be to be confused with kamiko, or indeed with Master Shifu, a character in the excellent Kung Fu Panda film franchise, voiced by Dustin Hoffman—is a spun paper yarn that can be used to make clothing of all kinds. The very finest kind of shifu is combined with silk to make the most exquisite gleaming cloth, and is still made today by the internationally renowned Sadako Sakurai in the small town of Horimachi, north of Tokyo. Unlike its American twentieth-century counterpart, Japanese paper clothing is no novelty wear. It’s sturdy stuff. Like the famous oiled and lacquered paper umbrellas, wagasa, traditional Japanese paper clothes are often treated to improve resistance to wind and rain. One particular kind of paper, momigami, is first treated with starch and then crumpled into balls until it’s so flexible and strong that it begins to resemble leather, and so can be made into clothes, bags and wallets, similar to Korean jumchi, or joomchi, which is made of layers of hanji paper laid together, oiled and beaten, and is an integral part of Korean national culture. (In fact, jumchi is so versatile it can be used to make both clothes and cupboards.) “It is estimated”—though how is not clear—“that 75 percent or more of the population of China and Japan wear paper clothing,” according to The Paper-Maker and British Paper Trade Journal in 1914. “The poorer class of Germany likewise indulge in paper apparel, as do a majority of the population of Mexico.”
The problem with indulging in paper apparel, wherever you are, and whenever you are, is that it has a tendency to go up in flames. One suspects that one of the main reasons the paper-dress craze died out so suddenly in the late 1960s is that everyone was smoking. It was the wrong material at the wrong time: to borrow the memorable words of Grace Slick, from Jefferson Airplane’s “Greasy Heart,” on their magnificent 1968 album Crown of Creation, “Paper dresses catch on fire and you lose her in the haze.” In 2011, newspapers in England carried reports of a woman whose homemade toilet-paper dress caught fire during a bachelorette party in central London: she wasn’t lost in the haze, thank goodness, but she did sustain serious upper-body injuries. A spokesman for the London Fire Brigade said, “There’s a serious side to this—candles can be lethal if you don’t keep an eye on them. Make sure candles and tea lights are placed well away from flammable items and clothing otherwise the results can be catastrophic.” And yet every day, all around the world, people indulge in a seriously dangerous paper ritual: they take a piece of paper, place it in their mouth, and set light to it.
In his book Cigarettes Are Sublime (1993), his celebratory “ode to cigarettes,” Richard Klein claims that “Extracted from its pack and smoked, the cigarette writes a poem, sings an aria, or choreographs a dance, narrating a story in signs that are written hieroglyphically in space and breath”; the cigarette, in other words, made from paper, works like paper: we write ourselves upon it. Cigarettes, in this Kleinian reading, are another of our paper props, or prosthetics, extending and articulating our very selves. A cigarette can of course be rolled in some kind of leaf rather than in paper, but this is hardly the symbolic smoke we all know and love. According to Ned Rival, another celebrant of the cigarette, in Tabac, miroir du temps (1981), “Tout le chic de la cigarette tient alors dans le papier” (“The whole chic of the cigarette resides in the paper”). The cylindrical white paper cigarette, one might argue—as many have—is a kind of displaced phallus, and thus a sign of sexual availability. It was certainly a sign of late-nineteenth-century decadence, with many artists and writers taking up cigarette smoking as an outward and visible sign of their inward and spiritual dissolution and decay. Nothing says I’m a despairing intellectual like sucking on flaming paper. Ned Rival is right: cigarette-chic is paper-chic, and this is nowhere more apparent than in the cult and rituals of rolling papers. As a child, rolling my grandfather’s cigarettes for him, using medium-weight green Rizlas, was an act of shared communion, a tacit passing on of knowledge from generation to generation, like the handing-on of the ever-present baton of the Sun on the dashboard of his truck (Rizla +, the brand name, comes from the word “riz,” being French for “rice,” while the “la” and the cross represent the name of the Lacroix family, who established the business in the seventeenth century). I once knew a man who used only French Zig-Zag papers for his roll-ups—which is fine, of course, if you are actually French, and living in actual France. He wasn’t. The famous face of the bearded Zouave on Zig-Zag packets remains forever in my mind the ultimate symbol of paper pretension. Decadence turns inevitably to stupid, as paper turns to ash.
If paper-suited cigarettes represent one of the great pleasures and evils of this world, it turns out that the next world too is tricked out in paper. Unsurpassed as a spiritual technology, and as a store of spiritual knowledge, paper remains the perfect multifaith, multipurpose platform for almost any religious event and occasion. Whether protecting ourselves with paper amulets, making offerings of votive slips, or nailing it to Wittenberg church doors, paper has the advantage over other popular spiritual technologies, such as, say, blood, animal carcasses, crystals, hair shirts, metal cilices or Scientology E-meters, being light, flexible, flammable, capable of being decorated and inscribed and not requiring batteries.
Perhaps the purest expression of paper’s otherworldly aspects are Tibetan lungta papers (“lung” meaning “wind,” and “ta” meaning “horse”), those beautiful small pieces of square, thin paper, printed on one side in one of five different colors—white, for water; blue, for
sky; yellow, for earth; red, sun; green, air—and in the middle of which is printed a wind horse, which is a flying horse, which is an image of the human soul, obviously, surrounded by sacred text, with other animals depicted in each corner, and which are thrown up into the air to carry prayers, to bless a journey, or just for good luck. No confetti-banning priests in Tibet. When the roll is called up yonder, paper’s name will sure be there: as shide, the white paper strips hung on the shimenawa, the ropes hung at Shinto shrines to mark the division between the sacred and profane, and on the gohei, the wooden wands used in purification rituals; as the paper cutouts known as kata-shiro, cast into flowing water, as a curse and as a blessing; as hóngbaō, or ang bao, or ang pao, the little red envelopes containing “lucky money,” presented as a gift at weddings and at Chinese New Year; as joss paper, or ghost money, or Bank of Hell notes, burned as offerings in China and elsewhere, that one’s ancestors might enjoy peace and prosperity in the afterlife; as the kongming sky lanterns that grace numerous religious festivals throughout Asia, and increasingly at Western weddings; and as the piece of paper bearing the shem inserted in the mouth of the Golem, which brought it to life to protect the Jewish people; but definitely, definitely not as the text of the Shema in a mezuzah, which must be written on parchment by a sofer, a scribe; using paper for this purpose is strictly not kosher.
So much then for paper, religion and ritual. Enough already of folklore, God and prayer. One hopes, of course, as John Ashbery has it in his poem “From Old Notebooks,” that they are “Worth looking up, these tepid old/things,” but what about hot, new, shiny things? What about science and technology, and computers and engineering? We shall take it for granted, as everyone does, that what is now called “technology transfer” has always occurred and even now continues to occur through ideas being transmitted on paper, and that there is no such thing as what the down-to-earth futurist Buckminster Fuller in Critical Path (1981) called “telepathically intercommunicated wisdom.” This is obvious: scientific wisdom works best when written down, not least for patent purposes. Lab notebooks remain an important part of a research scientist’s equipment (Fuller was an obsessive chronicler of his own life and ideas). Obvious. As obvious as the fact that the history of science is first and foremost a history of argument, much of which takes place on paper. But it is perhaps worth reminding ourselves that not just the abstract arguments but also the very practical spaces of science, including the physical and social settings of research, the experiments, and the scientific visitor attractions, have also been determined by paper. Paper helps turn metaphysics into applied metaphysics. In the nineteenth century, for example, it helped turn natural history into a natural history museum.
Around the middle of the nineteenth century, Richard Owen, superintendent of natural history at the British Museum, decided that natural history deserved its own museum, and he set about making his argument on paper, in letters and in campaigns. In 1858, more than a hundred naturalists signed a letter to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, complaining about the display of natural history in the British Museum. Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwin put together a petition. Owen published a booklet, On the Extent and Aims of a National Museum of Natural History (1862). Money was raised. A competition was announced for the building of a new museum. Plans were submitted. Francis Fowke won the competition, on the strength of his perspective drawing. Interiors were sketched and designed. Plans became reality, and the new British Museum (Natural History), which we know now as the Natural History Museum, one of the jewels in the crown of Albertopolis, finally opened to the public on Easter Monday 1881. Paper had helped it happen.
Anecdotal accounts of the propelling power of paper behind developments in science and technology could be gathered ad infinitum, stacked like Mary Kettilby’s paper-thin cream and sherry pancakes. But to take just one particularly delicious and obvious example: the engineer Henry Petroski, in his memoir Paperboy: Confessions of a Future Engineer (2002), focuses on a brief but intense period during his early life, from August 1, 1954, to January 25, 1958, to be calliper-precise, when he worked as a paperboy delivering the Long Island Press in his neighborhood in Queens, New York. Petroski claims that this experience gave him a heightened sense of “distance, time, and number,” so much so that it helped influence and determine his future career:
How many papers a paperboy had to draw was math; how he delivered them was engineering. How many papers could fit in the bag was math; how many more could be fit in was engineering. How the bicycle moved with its load was science; how he managed to pedal it up a hill was engineering. How the papers were supposed to be flipped was science; how the papers were flipped was engineering. How the papers landed where they did was science; how the papers got there was engineering. How the newsprint soiled his hands was science; how he washed it off was engineering.
Or to take a more significant example: in his book on the discovery of the double helical structure of DNA, The Double Helix (1968), James Watson describes how the team at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge would build models—actual models, made of metal—in their attempt to understand the working mechanism of DNA. One afternoon, while waiting for some of the models to be constructed, Watson became impatient, “so I spent the rest of the afternoon cutting accurate representations of the bases out of stiff cardboard.” The next morning, he writes, he “quickly cleared away the papers from my desk” and set to work with the cardboard, trying to come up with a new shape and pattern to form representational pairs of cardboard bases connected by notional hydrogen bonds. “Suddenly I became aware that an adenine-thymine pair held together by two hydrogen bonds was identical in shape to a guanine-cytosine pair held together by at least two hydrogen bonds. All the hydrogen bonds seemed to form naturally; no fudging was required to make the two types of base pairs identical in shape.” By lunchtime, Watson’s lab partner Francis Crick was telling everyone in the pub that “we had found the secret of life.”
Crick and Watson’s discovery notwithstanding, The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is, of course, 42—at least according to the supercomputer Deep Thought in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (And why 42? According to one theory—there are several—the so-called “paperback line theory,” Adams picked 42 because it’s the average number of lines on the page of a paperback book. More likely, he picked it because it sounds funny.) As every steam- and cyberpunk enthusiast knows, paper played an important role in the development of computing, super-, real, fictional and otherwise, and continues to do so. Charles Babbage’s famous Analytical Engine, the first general-purpose programmable computer, relied on cardboard as an essential part of its apparatus. Indeed, Babbage had mocked up his earlier Difference Engine—like the Analytical Engine, a grand project undertaken but never completed, largely due to lack of funds, but partly due to the fact that he was an impossible man to work with—with cardboard cutouts, all worked out in his voluminous “scribbling books.”
Babbage’s perforated cardboard cards were inspired by and adapted from the cards used by Joseph Marie Jacquard in his programmable weaving loom, an important machine in the history not just of technology but of human evolution, according to Manuel De Landa in War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991), because it “transferred control (and structure) from the human body to the machine in the form of a primitive program stored as punched holes in paper cards, the earliest form of software”: paper helping to inaugurate not just the modern age of computers, therefore, but also the postmodern age of cybernetics; paper prefiguring the posthuman. In William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s novel The Difference Engine (1991), their Babbbage-inspired vision of a technologically advanced Victorian London, governed by Prime Minister Lord Byron, paper proliferates. Everyone carries a “citizen-card,” a kind of multipurpose identity-card-cum-credit-card, printers endlessly punch out paper tape, and “clackers” (programmers) are so named because of the sound of paper cards clacking through the
big brass steam-driven computers. Fantasy? Reality: in the mid-twentieth century the computer giant IBM’s entire business was based on paper, with their famous punch cards (“Do not fold, spindle or mutilate”) being used to record units of information in the form of code, before being replaced by magnetic tape during the 1960s. And the sound of clacking can still be distantly heard today in the paper prototyping methods used by Microsoft and others to develop user interfaces. Modern paper prototyping is so low-tech it’s almost laughable: a method of sketching on-screen commands and instructions on paper, before spending millions in software development.
