by Ian Sansom
No laughing matter is the role—or roll, rather—of paper in the history of medicine and hygiene. We are accustomed now to surgical gowns, masks, caps, tape and bandages all being made from paper. But in the early seventeenth century, in the West, even paper tissues were unheard of. In 1613 Lord Date Masamune, a farsighted, one-eyed Japanese warlord, sent an envoy named Hasekura Rokuemon Tsunenaga to visit Europe, where he and his traveling companions caused a sensation, not least because they carried with them at all times hanagami—”flower” or “nose” paper—with which they would blow their noses or wipe their faces, or clean their hands, and would then discard, with James Brown–like panache. The Marchioness of St. Tropez recalled the impression this made upon the French: “When any one of the Japanese used the paper handkerchief and threw it away on the street they would run up to him and pick it up. They even fought among themselves in order to secure one of these priceless momentoes [sic].”
The custom of using paper to wipe and clean the hands and mouth probably goes back to sixth-century China, and by the fourteenth century, according to the scholar Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin and the Sinologist’s Sinologist, Joseph Needham, ten million packages of toilet paper a year were being produced in one province alone. The rest of us, however, caught on slowly: in ancient Rome, a stick was used, with a sponge attached to the end; Eskimos reportedly used tundra moss, or snow; and others have used mussel shells, coconut shells, corn cobs, pebbles, broken pottery, and whatever came to hand. Including the hand. The famous chapter of “wipe-bummatory discourse” in Rabelais’s Gargantua (1534), in the beautifully unrestrained translation by Thomas Urquhart (1653), has Gargantua explaining to his father that he has finally found, “by a long and curious experience,” the perfect way to wipe his bottom. He has tried a lady’s velvet mask, he says (“very voluptuous and pleasant to my fundament”), earrings (“they fetched away all the skin of my tail with a vengeance”), a March-cat (“her claws were so sharp that they scratched and exulcerated all my perinee”), gloves, sage, fennel, marjoram, roses, lettuce and spinach leaves. He has also tried sheets, curtains, cushions, carpets, a tablecloth, napkins, and a number of hats (“The best of all these is the shaggy hat, for it makes a very neat abstersion of the fecal matter”). Moving on to animals, he admits that he has tried a hen, a cock, a pullet, a hare and a pigeon, but eventually concludes that of “all torcheculs, arsewisps, bumfodders, tail-napkins, bunghole cleansers, and wipe-breeches, there is none in the world comparable to the neck of a goose, that is well downed, if you hold her head betwixt your legs.” A man named Joseph Gayetty is a great friend to the goose, having been the first person, around 1857, to manufacture toilet paper in the United States, where people now use on average 23.6 rolls per year—which would add up to a lot of geese. And about half a tree. According to current industry figures, approximately eighty-three million rolls of toilet paper are produced worldwide per day, by far the fastest-growing sector in paper production. Greenpeace’s recent successful campaign, Kleercut, against Kimberly-Clark’s use of wood pulp to make toilet paper from Canada’s boreal forest is both evidence of the power of conservation campaigning and a reminder of Gargantua’s words, that “Who his foul tail with paper wipes,/Shall at his ballocks leave some chips.”
And, finally, from balls to balloons, and the paper we continue to drive on, walk on, ride on and fly in. There was perhaps a certain poetic justice in the use of 2,500,000 remaindered Mills & Boon romantic novels to help make the top layer of asphalt of the M6 in England in 2003. The pulped novels apparently help to absorb sound—the endless silent crushing of romantic hopes and dreams. Paper has also been used to make wheels, on American railway cars in the nineteenth century, from giant disks of paper pasted together under pressure, and has played no small part in the history of manned flight. The Montgolfiers were a family of papermakers, their balloons made of paper and silk; the Wright brothers used paper models in wind tunnels to test their planes; and more recently a team at the University of Stuttgart has been attempting to develop a large-capacity aircraft with a paper fuselage (as well as its sound- and energy-absorbing capacities, paper as a material is, crucially, much cheaper than steel). Even higher and further, in 2008 Professor Shinichi Suzuki of the University of Tokyo announced plans to launch paper planes from the International Space Station. “We think from this experiment we will be able to create new concepts and in the very near future perhaps new types of airship from this design,” he told the BBC. Alas, the Suzuki method never worked out: the Space Age of Paper is yet to come.
The age of the paper boat, meanwhile, has been and gone. From 1989 to 1995 an American eccentric, Ken Cupery, produced an occasional newsletter for paper-boat enthusiasts called The Paper Boater, which proclaimed itself “The World’s Leading Journal of Cellulose-Based Naval Architecture.” The world’s only journal of cellulose-based naval architecture. Such an architecture did and does exist. A famous recent example is the eighty-foot-long paper boat built as a memorial to Glasgow’s shipbuilding industry by the great Scottish artist George Wylie, who sailed it down the Clyde in 1989, and then up the Hudson in 1990. But the greatest paper boater who ever lived was undoubtedly John Taylor, who started his working life as a waterman on the Thames, went on to serve with Sir Walter Raleigh and the Earl of Essex on the 1596 expedition to Cadiz, and on expeditions to the Azores, and who on eventually returning to England found that he’d developed a taste for adventure, and so embarked on a series of extraordinary escapades and publicity stunts that he hoped would make him rich and famous. Taylor was, in the words of Simon Schama, in Landscape and Memory (1995), “not simply some twopenny-ha’penny penny trickster spawned in the taverns of Bankside. He was in his way truly unique: a self-invented celebrity, a wicked parodist of literary pretensions, the populi of the dockyards and alehouses that lined the south bank of the Thames . . . irate in his opinions, obstinate in his passions, saucy in their expression, selectively high-minded, deeply politically incorrect, hugely entertaining . . .”
In 1614 Taylor challenged the poet William Fennor to a “poetic duel” at the Hope Theatre in London. He sold tickets in advance, and published an account of the duel after the event. He was defeated by Fennor, but no matter. He had established a useful model for his future activities, funding adventures using public money up front, and then cashing in with a pamphlet when it was all over. In 1616 he traveled from London to Edinburgh and back again on what he called a “Penniless Pilgrimage.” Then he wrote a pub guide. And a directory of carriage services. Ran a pub in Covent Garden. And in 1620 he traveled down the Thames in a brown-paper boat.
Taylor retells his experience in his poem The Praise of Hemp-Seed with the Voyage of Mr. Roger Bird and the Writer hereof, in a boat of browne-Paper, from London to Quinborough in Kent (1620):
I therefore to conclude this much will note
How I of Paper lately made a Boat,
And how in forme of Paper I did row
From London unto Quinborough Ile show.
The journey started well, but not surprisingly, somewhere off the coast between Kent and Essex, the boat began to leak:
The water to the Paper being got,
In one half houre our boat began to rot:
The Thames (most lib’rall) fild her to the halves,
Whilst Hodge and I sate liquor’d to the calves.
It was kept afloat by Taylor’s determination, by the bullocks’ bladders filled with air attached to the flimsy craft, and by the enthusiasm of the cheering crowds:
Thousands of people all the shores did hide,
And thousands more did meet us in the tide
With Scullers, Oares, with ship-boats, & with Barges
To gaze on us, they put themselves to charges.
The journey lasted three days, from Saturday to Monday, “In rotten paper and boysterous weather,” until Taylor and his companion clambered out at Queenborough Castle on the Isle of Sheppey, to be wined and dined by the local mayor. Taylor, in his usual enterprising
way, had hoped to be able to exhibit the boat, but as he recounts:
But whilst we at our dinners thus were merry,
The Country people tore our tatter’d wherry
In mammocks peecemeale in a thousand scraps,
Wearing the reliques in their hats and caps.
What had begun in great hope ended in mammocks peecemeale (a “mammock,” explains the OED, is “a scrap, shred, broken or torn piece”).
We began our journey through the history of paper with Salvador Plascencia’s fantastic novel The People of Paper (2005). Let us end with Carlos María Domínguez’s equally fantastic The Paper House (2005), in which the protagonist, Carlos Brauer, becomes first obsessed and then deranged by books, so much so that on his bed there are “twenty or so books carefully laid out in such a way that they reproduced the mass and outline of a human body.” To overcome the relationship, to sever the ties, he commits the brutal act of building a house from his books, cementing them together like bricks, using “a Borges to fit under a windowsill, a Vallejo for the door, with Kafka above it and Kant beside it.” For a brief moment all the paper that had nurtured and educated him looks as though it might become a useful shelter and a shade for him and for others, but not for long, “because even in the heady tenacious hope of the printed word, made possible by printers, designers, secretaries, typesetters, commentators, writers, and messengers, craftsmen in inks and bindings, illustrators, prologue writers, cultured critics of memory, paper is an organic product that, like the pine trees on the road, sooner or later falls prey to the jaws of the sea in a silent, devastating collapse.”
Mammocks.
A paper boat, sinking
THE HOLLOW IN THE PAPER
Acknowledgments
The hollow in the paper between the front and the back of a thin sheet of paper . . . To be studied! . . . it is a category which has occupied me a great deal over the last ten years. I believe that by means of the intra-slim one can pass from the second to the third dimension.
MARCEL DUCHAMP, quoted by Denis de Rougement,
“Marcel Duchamp, mine de rien” (1968),
repr. in Marcel Duchamp, Notes, ed. Paul Matisse (1980)
For previous acknowledgments see The Truth About Babies (Granta Books, 2002), Ring Road (4th Estate, 2004), The Mobile Library: The Case of the Missing Books (Harper Perennial, 2006), The Mobile Library: Mr. Dixon Disappears (Harper Perennial, 2006), The Mobile Library: The Delegates’ Choice (Harper Perennial, 2008), and The Mobile Library: The Bad Book Affair (Harper Perennial, 2010). These stand, with exceptions. In addition I would like to thank the following. (The previous terms and conditions apply: some of them are dead; most of them are strangers; the famous are not friends; none of them bears any responsibility.)
Jonathan Agnew, Foz Allan, Eric Ambler, Kristin Andreassen, Ards Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, John Franklin Bardin, Catherine Bates, Maurice Blanchot, Peter Blegvad, Amy Blythe, Ian Bostridge, Alfred Brendel, Gerard Brennan, Vera Brice, Carla Bruni, David Burke, Victoria Button, Paul Caddell, Caine’s Arcade, Sophie Calle, Brian Caraher, Michel de Certeau, Kellie Chambers, Aislinn Clarke, Cheryl Cole, Ruby Colley, Seamus Collins, Stephanie Conn, Shimon Craimer, Martina Crawford, Martin Cromie, Laura Cunningham, Sean Curran, Guy Debord, Linda Drain, Joseph Duffin, David Dwan, Geoff Dyer, Will Eaves, Lisa Edelstein, Craig Edwards, Hiba El Mansouri, Omar Epps, Frantz Fanon, Patrick Fitzsymons, Maureen Freely, Brid Gallagher, General Fiasco, Craig Gibson, Chris Gingell, Gotye, Andrea Grossman, Moyra Haslett, Caroline Healy, Toni Hegarty, Ivan Herbison, Naftali Herstik, Ben Highmore, Peter Jacobson, Boyd Jamison, Stephen Kelly, Diarmuid Kennedy, Bernadette Kiernan, Nicola Killow, Kimbra, John Knowles, the staff of Krem, Gidon Kremer, Robert Lacey, Martin Lamb, Heather Larmour, Christopher Lasch, Hugh Laurie, Catherine Lavery, Gary Learmonth, Henri Lefebvre, Robert Sean Leonard, Sheila Llewellyn, Johanna Lyle, Shan McAnena, Michael McAteer, Nathaniel McAuley, Darran McCann, Denise McGeown, Michael McGlade, Philip McGowan, Niall McGuckian, Susannah McKenna, Ryan McNeilly, Patrick McOscar, Bernie McQuillan, Karen McQuinn, Sheila McWade, Fiona Mackie, Hugh Magennis, Ben Maier, Alison Marchant, Zeljka Marosevic, Marcel Mauss, Ruben Moi, Helen Molesworth, Martin Mooney, David Morley, Francis Morrison, Jennifer Morrison, Chris Moyles, Kevin Mulhern, Gerry Mulligan, Romano Mullin, Emma Must, Romily Must, Padraigin Ni Ullachain, Michael Nolan, Marcus Patton, Kal Penn, Tommy Potts, Janet Pywell, the staff of Queen’s University Library, Katy Radford, Joan Rahilly, Marcelo Rayel, Shaun Regan, Stefano Res, Daniel Roberts, John Roberts, Marco Rodrigues, Gil Scott-Heron, Stephen Sexton, Matthew Shelton, Chris Sherry, Shiftz, Jane Shilling, David Shore, Paul Simpson, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Jesse Spencer, Roberta Stabilini, Jonathan Stead, Mark Stevenson, Erin Stewart, Martin Strel, Tahan, Orla Travers, Two Door Cinema Club, Malte Urban, Dianne Vinson, Walk off the Earth, David Walliams, Tara West.
TEARING THE BOOK INTO PIECES
A Bibliography
This intensive way of reading, in contact with what’s outside the book, as a flow meeting other flows, one machine among others, as a series of experiments for each reader in the midst of events that have nothing to do with books, as tearing the book into pieces, getting it to interact with other things, absolutely anything . . . is reading with love.
GILLES DELEUZE, “Letter to a Harsh Critic,”
in Negotations, 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (1995)
Introduction: RESPECTING PAPER
Brown, John Seely, and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press, 2000).
Conan Doyle, Arthur, The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes (London: Penguin, 2009).
de Saussure, Ferdinand, Course in General Linguistics (1916), trans. Wade Baskin (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
Derrida, Jacques, Paper Machine (2001), trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
Golding, William, Free Fall (London: Faber and Faber, 1959).
Malraux, André, Museum Without Walls (1965), trans. Stuart Gilbert and Francis Price (London: Secker & Warburg, 1967).
Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
Parry, Ross, ed., Museums in a Digital Age (London: Routledge, 2010).
Plascencia, Salvador, The People of Paper (San Francisco: McSweeney’s Books, 2005).
Sellen, Abigail J., and Richard H.R. Harper, The Myth of the Paperless Office (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001).
Smith, Stevie, Novel on Yellow Paper (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936).
“The Wonderful Adaptability of Paper,” The Paper World (June 1880).
“The Wonderful Uses of Paper,” The Paper World (October 1881).
1: A MIRACLE OF INSCRUTABLE INTRICACY
Baker, Cathleen A., By His Own Labor: The Biography of Dard Hunter (Delaware: Oak Knoll, 2000).
Barrett, T., Japanese Papermaking: Traditions, Tools and Techniques (New York: Weatherhill, 1983).
Bloom, Jonathan M., Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
Blum, André, On the Origin of Paper, trans. Harry Miller Lydenberg (New York: R.R. Bowker, 1934).
Clapperton, Robert Henderson, The Paper-making Machine: Its Invention, Evolution and Development (London: Pergamon, 1967).
Clapperton, Robert Henderson, and William Henderson, Modern Paper-Making (London: Ernest Benn, 1929).
Coleman, D.C., The British Paper Industry, 1495–1860 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958).
Hands, Joan, and Roger Hands, Paper Pioneers (Berkhamsted: Dacorum Heritage Trust, 2008).
Herring, Richard, Paper & Paper Making, Ancient and Modern (London: Longman, 2nd edn., 1856).
Hills, Richard D., Papermaking in Britain 1488–1988 (London: Athlone Press, 1988).
Hobsbawm, E.J., and George Rudé, Captain Swing (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1969).
Hunter, Dard, Papermaking: The History and Techniq
ue of an Ancient Craft (London: Cresset Press, 2nd edn., 1957).
Labarre, Emile Joseph, Dictionary and Encyclopaedia of Paper and Paper-making (Amsterdam: Swets & Zeitlinger, 2nd edn., 1952).
Lines, Clifford, and Graham Booth, Paper Matters: Today’s Paper & Board Industry Unfolded (Swindon: Paper Publications Ltd., 1990).
McGaw, Judith A., Most Wonderful Machine: Mechanization and Social Change in Berkshire Paper Making, 1801–1885 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
Maddox, H.A., Paper: Its History, Sources, and Manufacture (London: Pitman & Sons, 1916).
Melville, Herman, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” (1855), in Richard Chase, ed., Herman Melville: Selected Tales and Poems (New York: Holt, Rhinehart & Winston, 1966).
Robinson, Laura, and Ian Thorn, Handbook of Toxicology and Ecotoxicology for the Pulp and Paper Industry (Oxford: Blackwell Science, 2001).
Stirk, Jean, “The ‘Swing Riots’ & the Paper Machine Breakers,” The Quarterly: The Journal of the British Association of Paper Historians 13 (December 1994).
Watson, Barry, “John Evelyn’s Visit to a Paper Mill,” The Quarterly: The Journal of the British Association of Paper Historians 64 (October 2007).
Watt, Alexander, The Art of Papermaking: A Practical Handbook of the Manufacture of Paper from Rags, Esparto, Straw and Other Fibrous Materials, Including the Manufacture of Pulp from Wood Fibre (London: Crosby Lockwood and Son, 1890).
2: IN THE WOOD
Bate, Jonathan, The Song of the Earth (London: Picador, 2000).
Bloch, Maurice, “Why Trees, Too, Are Good to Think With: Towards an Anthropology of the Meaning of Life,” in Laura Rival, ed., The Social Life of Trees: Anthropological Perspectives on Tree Symbolism (Oxford: Berg, 1998).
Calvino, Italo, The Baron in the Trees, trans. Archibald Colquhoun (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959).
Carson, Ciaran, The Inferno of Dante Alighieri: A New Translation (London: Granta, 2002).
