The Nature of the Page
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In The Nature of the Page , Joshua Calhoun tells the story of handmade paper in Renaissance England and beyond. For most of the history of printing, paper was made primarily from recycled rags, so this is a story about using old clothes to tell new stories, about plants used to make clothes, and about plants that frustrated papermakers' best attempts to replace scarce natural resources with abundant ones. Because plants, like humans, are susceptible to the ravages of time, it is also a story of corruption and the hope that we can preserve the things we love from decay. Combining environmental and bibliographical research with deft literary analysis, Calhoun reveals how much we have left to discover in familiar texts. He describes the transformation of plant material into a sheet of paper, details how ecological availability or scarcity influenced literary output in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and examines the impact of the various colors and qualities of paper on early modern reading practices. Through a discussion of sizing—the mixture used to coat the surface of paper so that ink would not blot into its fibers—he reveals a surprising textual interaction between animals and readers. He shows how we might read an indistinct stain on the page of an early modern book to better understand the mixed media surfaces on which readers, writers, and printers recorded and revised history. Lastly, Calhoun considers how early modern writers imagined paper decay and how modern scholars grapple with biodeterioration today. Exploring the poetic interplay between human ideas and the plant, animal, and mineral forms through which they are mediated, The Nature of the Page prompts readers to reconsider the role of the natural world in everything from old books to new smartphones.
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THE NATURE OF THE PAGE
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In the preface to Papermaking by Hand, Hamady recounts that “a scholar who had written a book on papermaking came to visit one time and when he saw the actual formation of the sheet, loudly exclaimed ‘so that’s how it’s done!’”43 I sympathize with the scholar in Hamady’s anecdote; I only began to appreciate the crucial role of cellulose in the papermaking process while standing in the snow in Portage, Wisconsin, about eleven miles as the crow flies from where Aldo Leopold found the driftwood discussed in the Introduction. I was using a canoe paddle to stir a cauldron in which Robert Possehl was boiling down a herbaceous plant known locally as Lady’s Mantle—identified in Renaissance herbals by the same name or, alternately, “great Sanicle” or “Lyons Foot.”44 We were cooking plants, not retting rags, but our object was the same. “Cellulose is what paper is made from,” Possehl said, and the process of cooking is one way to reduce the plant to pure cellulose. I relate this story, anecdotal as it is, in an attempt to properly cite the sources from which I have borrowed insights. This is a book that could not have been written well by relying solely on other books; rather, it relies on the generosity and insight of scholars and artisans, many of whom, like Possehl, have not published the unique insights they have gained from decades of research and experimentation. Working, however, with someone who excels at making paper directly from plants, I began to understand how the need for more “cheap and reliable” sources of cellulose affected the history of the book in the first place.
Cheap cellulose would be cellulose that is both abundant and easily extractable. All plants contain cellulose, but in varying amounts. For instance, cellulose makes up “about 90 percent of cotton and about 50 percent of wood.”45 Fiber length matters, too. Flax has about 10 percent less cellulose than cotton, but “its fiber was longer and stronger, and its fiber wall was straighter and thicker.”46 In rag form, plant fibers came to papermakers pre-processed: the labor required to convert the plants into textiles had already been done. The labor of further breaking down the fibers through use (as clothing or ship sails, for example) processed the plant fibers even more. So no matter what the plant fiber, much less labor was required to pulp and make paper from linen rags or ship sails than directly from flax and hemp plants. We might visualize the rag shortage crisis as a triangle where the simplest solution would be to cut out the textile phase and make paper directly from plants (see Figure 4). Thus we see so many lists of experimental plants in the history of paper, and so many years passing without a viable paper product. Then Matthias Koops, an immigrant to England at the end of the eighteenth century, claimed the problem of scarce, expensive, imported rags could be solved with a readily available, cheap, local raw material: oat and wheat straw.
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