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CHAPTER 1

Substances Used to Convey Ideas: Ship Sails, Cellulose, and Spinning Wheels

The art of Paper-making ought to be regarded as one of the most useful which has ever been invented in any age or country; for it is manifest, that every other discovery must have continued useless to society, if it could not have been disseminated.

—Matthias Koops, Historical Account of the SubstancesWhich Have Been Used to Describe Events,and to Convey Ideas, from the Earliest Date,to the Invention of Paper

The lack of paper in England, due at first, no doubt, to the absence of any significant linen industry, meant that the Shakespearean text (like the vast majority of other English Renaissance texts) was a “foreign” body.

—Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass,

“The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text”

In John Gast’s 1872 painting American Progress, an allegorical representation of America (as Columbia) leads pioneer expansion westward (see Figure 2).¹ Hovering above a river, she holds a large volume labeled “School Book” in her right hand, pressed against her breast; below the book and coiled around the crook of her right arm is a telegraph wire that strings along behind her.² In the sunlit landscape at Columbia’s back, expectant trains cross open prairies westward toward cleared but train-trackless spaces. One of the trains appears to be set on a collision course with an enclave of teepees. Farther back and eastward, ships of different sizes sail around the tip of Manhattan and into the Hudson River, and the scene fades off in the upper right of the painting into rolling hills against a bright morning sky. It is the East, and Columbia is the sun. Before her, a shadowy landscape awaits refinement. Deeper into these shadows, Native Americans and buffalo and bear and deer flee. We cannot see the Pacific Ocean, a boundary that might suggest the limits of expansion.³

FIGURE 2. American Progress, chromolithograph by George A. Crofutt (ca. 1873) after 1872 painting by John Gast.

Like the narrative depicted in American Progress, the narratives we tend to tell about the history of paper advance from past toward present, from East toward West, and from human ingenuity toward nonhuman, natural resources. In Dard Hunter’s seminal Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft and in any number of scholarly and/or popular histories of papermaking, we find a chronological narrative that pans from evidence of the invention of papermaking about two thousand years ago in China (in the first or second century BCE) toward its spread across the world.⁴ By the end of the eighth century BCE, paper-making had spread to Samarkand (present-day Uzbekistan) and then on to Baghdad. By the thirteenth century, paper was being made in Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Spain, France, and Italy. By the end of the fifteenth century, it was being made in Germany and England. In 1690, the first paper mill, Rittenhouse Mill in Pennsylvania, was set up in the United States. By 1854, the first paper mill west of the Missouri River began operating in Salt Lake City, Utah.⁵

In these past-to-present, East-to-West accounts, a human desire to produce a media that can be used for recording takes center stage. Religious zeal, for instance, is often credited as the impetus for the spread of papermaking: Buddhist missionaries first bring papermaking technology from China to Japan and Korea; Muslims bring papermaking to Iraq, Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and, eventually, to Italy and Spain; Christian crusaders bring papermaking even farther west; by 1860, Brigham Young starts a paper mill in Utah.⁶ Nonhuman materials are discussed at critical transition points in the narrative—from plant-sourced papyrus to animal-sourced parchment to plant-sourced paper, from mulberry fibers in the East to linen rags to tree pulp in the West—but then they tend to disappear from view even as the very technology that brought those nonhuman materials into view begins to overwhelm and exhaust natural supply. But when, inevitably, resources become scarce, the nonhuman reemerges in the papermaking narrative as human innovators ask: What other substances might we be able to record ideas upon? This linear narrative from past, East, and human toward present, West, and nonhuman is an effective and compelling way of organizing a story that continues to be of interest to specialized and general audiences alike.⁷ It is also, like every story—like this story or like the one depicted in American Progress—a structure that makes some features more prominent and more important and other features less noteworthy and less meaningful. This chapter reverses the usual narrative, opting instead to tell the history of paper from present toward past, from West toward East, from nonhuman to human, offering a perspectival shift that allows us to see a plant-based media that has changed human and environmental history. It is a perspective, too, that allows us to see how little papermaking technology changed in Europe from the late 1300s to the mid-1800s. Only in the last century and a half has the papermaking industry relied on trees. For most of the history of printed texts, plant fibers, worn and used to rags by humans, then recycled, have been the primary source of material for papermaking.

Legible Sails

Ships, like those whose bright sails catch our attention on the eastern seaboard of Gast’s American Progress, help to frame this chapter about the plant substances that are used to convey ideas. This chapter’s reverse-chronological narrative begins with Henry David Thoreau watching tattered ship sails pass by Walden Pond in America ca. 1840 and ends with John Taylor, “The Water Poet,” in “a Boat of brown-paper” that is sinking into the Thames River in England ca. 1620 (see Figure 3).⁸ Ships, especially ship sails, are a shared point of reference for both writers. If we imagine some trick of spacetime by which these two writers find themselves side by side in an art gallery examining American Progress, we realize that Taylor would be confounded by the telegraph wire that strings all the way back to the Atlantic Ocean, and Thoreau would need to explain that technological innovation to him. However, the masted ships sailing in New York Bay and the book in Columbia’s arm would have been familiar enough to both writers. Both would have understood the ecosystemic relationship between ship sails and books, an ecosystemic relationship that was crucial to human communications from the spread of papermaking technology in medieval Europe through the Industrial Revolution and right up until the end of the nineteenth century.

FIGURE 3. Title page from John Taylor, The Praise of Hemp-seed (1620), sig. E4r. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Taylor would also need Thoreau to explain the locomotives puffing their way westward, and we can guess from chapter 4 of Walden that Thoreau might do so with conviction. Few sections of Walden mar the notion of Thoreau as a solitary hermit writing in the wilderness quite so much as the chapter “Sounds,” in which Thoreau devotes his attention not to the noises and songs of the pond’s inhabitants, but to the sounds and rhythms of the railroad just south of the pond. Two chapters earlier, Thoreau leveled an oft-quoted critique of the railroad—“We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us”—but in his chapter on “Sounds,” he likens the train’s whistle to “the scream of a hawk” and expresses appreciation for its daily rumblings: “I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me, and I smell the stores which go dispensing their odors all the way from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs, and Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe.”⁹ Thoreau writes about brandy headed north to farmers in the Green Mountains, and about cattle cars headed south out of those farms. He looks up from his book and sees “some tall pine, hewn on far northern hills” on its way to becoming a ship mast.¹⁰

As Thoreau may have known, the pine-trees-as-ship-masts conceit recalls the Old English poem “The Dream of the Rood,” a prosopopoeic narrative told by the tree that became the cross on which Christ died. The traveling-tree conceit also feints toward the popular “it-narratives” of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.¹¹ In one relevant it-narrative that has received ample critical attention, “The Adventures of a Quire of Paper,” a man reading a printed sermon in a coffeehouse is suddenly accosted by the paper in his hands. “Though now offered under this form to thy eyes,” narrates the page, “yet know my original form was that of a thistle in the ditch that surrounded a farmer’s meadow.”¹² The thistle then relates a story of pride and glory and devastation, of being harvested with the flax in neighboring fields and of hardships on the way to becoming a printed sermon. We are not surprised, at the end, to learn from the human narrator that it was all a dream. Like the tree in “The Dream of the Rood,” the talking thistle/quire of paper was “merely the vision of a drowsy fit.”¹³

When, in the midst of his reflections on trains and sounds, Thoreau thinks about torn ship sails headed north to be recycled, he ventures even closer to an it-narrative like “The Adventures of a Quire of Paper”: “This car-load of torn sails is more legible and interesting now than if [the sails] should be wrought into paper and printed books. Who can write so graphically the history of the storms they have weathered as these rents have done? They are proof-sheets which need no correction.”¹⁴ Pulp them into paper and print Moby-Dick on them and they will not tell better stories of the sea than the stories they already offer in their current, ragged state. And yet these sails are insistently non-prosopopoeic in Thoreau’s telling. If, as Christina Lupton claims, “the defining feature” of it-narratives is that “they are told from the perspective of an object or (less commonly) an animal,” then Thoreau’s sails do not qualify, for though they have recorded the history of the storms, they do not speak up.¹⁵ In “Rood” and “Paper,” the dreaming readers or auditors are accosted by objects. In Thoreau, by contrast, a wide-awake reader reckons worn-out sails to be “more legible and interesting” than a sea narrative printed on paper. Legible to whom? Is Thoreau implying that, touching his fingers to the wounds in the sides of these sails, he can recount a detailed narrative of a storm at sea, something rivaling John Donne’s “The Storm”? Perhaps there is a reader, some ancient mariner, to whom each stain and scar recounts a detailed story, but most would rather read Sea Wolf than a sail.

Watching the train pass and imagining its cargo, Thoreau moves from torn hempen sails and their relationship to books to worn-out cotton and flax rags and their relationship to real-life narratives: “These rags in bales, of all hues and qualities, the lowest condition to which cotton and linen descend, the final result of dress,—of patterns which are now no longer cried up, unless it be in Milwaukie, as those splendid articles, English, French, or American prints, ginghams, muslins, &c., gathered from all quarters both of fashion and poverty, going to become paper of one color or a few shades only, on which forsooth will be written tales of real life, high and low, and founded on fact!”¹⁶ Within a couple of pages, the train has passed and Thoreau is back to listening to bird sounds, like the dismal scream of a screech owl, which, he claims, is “truly Ben Jonsonian.”¹⁷ In other words, soon after Thoreau ends his meditations upon the paper futures of sails and rags, he summons the ghosts of rags and sails past. Indeed, Thoreau scrawls all of these observations on the same kinds of material Jonson used to scrawl his ideas: flax, cotton, and hemp from recycled clothes and sails.

The sameness of source materials across centuries is most apparent in John Taylor’s celebratory poem The Praise of Hemp-seed (1620) (see Figure 3). In Hemp-seed, Taylor observes the same relationship between sails/clothing and paper that Thoreau rhapsodizes about. The hemp plant, writes Taylor,

makes clothes, cordage, halters, ropes and sailes.

From this small Atome, mighty matters springs.¹⁸

No stranger to the prosopopoeic narrative (Taylor’s 1630 collected works include Hemp-seed as well as an it-narrative called The Trauels of a tweluepence), in Hemp-seed, Taylor opts to tell the story as a wide-awake human narrator who celebrates hempseed’s many uses and then celebrates its second use in the form of paper (more than half of the poem is devoted to praising hempseed-as-paper). Less than halfway through the poem, Taylor writes,

But paper now’s the subiect of my booke,

And from whence paper it’s beginning tooke:

How that from little Hemp and flaxen seeds

Ropes, halters, drapery, and our napery breeds,

And from these things by Art and true endeuor,

Al paper is deriued, whatsoeuer.¹⁹

What we see, then, is that when Thoreau writes about papermaking materials at Walden Pond in the 1840s and/or when revising his manuscript in the 1850s, he describes the same raw materials Taylor was writing about across the Atlantic Ocean nearly two and a half centuries earlier. The material substance of paper is never really invisible, but it is always assumed. For most of the history of the book, rags make paper. It becomes a truism, even a common way of conceptualizing historical communities.²⁰

Reading and comparing these two passages from Thoreau and Taylor, written two centuries apart on two separate continents, we might mistakenly assume that papermaking from hemp-, cotton-, and flax-based rags was a remarkably stable, sustainable enterprise. And yet we know from historical accounts that between the time of Taylor and Thoreau, both England and America faced severe rag shortages. In A History of Paper-Manufacturing in the United States, 1690–1916, Lyman Horace Weeks claims that “the history of paper-making in Europe and in the United States is shot through and through with the records of persistent speculating and experimenting in the endeavor to escape from the limitation imposed upon it by sole dependence upon rags.”²¹ The young, independent American “Republic of Letters” depended heavily on European rags—rags that were already in short supply in Europe. By the end of the eighteenth century, newspaper advertisements routinely admonished households to recycle their rags for the good of the community and, eventually, for the good of the nation, rather than reusing rags within the home. Susan Strasser cites newspaper advertisements as “evidence of perpetual rag shortage in the colonies and the new nation and of the papermakers’ strategies of propaganda, education, and entreaty, aimed at gathering enough rags to keep new mills running.”²²

It is shocking, in retrospect, to consider how long it took for wood pulp to replace flax (and cotton and hemp) as the primary raw material from which paper is made, especially when “for more than a hundred years, the existence of the industry was constantly imperiled by this scarcity.”²³ Weeks writes of the “curious and exceedingly interesting chapter” in American history “which treats of the persistent and not always successful struggle for raw material to keep the mills going.”²⁴ He goes on to cite lists of hundreds of raw materials from which experimental paper was made, lists that include substances such as animal excrement, asbestos, asparagus, bananas, beets, brewery refuse, corncobs, cucumbers, dust, hop vines, horseradish, moss, peat, pineapples, pine shavings, turnips, and seaweed.²⁵ American papermakers began experimenting with local natural resources as early as the 1790s as numerous organizations, including the American Philosophical Society and the American Company of Booksellers, offered prizes for innovators who could discover a suitable replacement for rags. Woven into the language of these inquiries and experiments is a patriotic optimism that the untapped landscape of America would yield a new plant-based substitute for rags. In 1785, the poet Philip Freneau reimagined Palemon, a character who appears in Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale and Shakespeare’s Two Noble Kinsmen, immigrating to America “to tame the soil, and plant the arts.”²⁶ Well into the nineteenth century, American innovators were still struggling to find the plant that would help them escape dependency on European rags and realize their ambition of planting the arts. Back in Europe, some innovators were similarly drawn to the idea of making paper from native resources—not from an exotic new plant, but from some overlooked but viable source.

Fascinating stories of rag recycling, of rag-collecting propaganda, and of shocking materials like asparagus and excrement used to make paper are not uncommon. They tend to put all of the emphasis on humans, on book and paper consumers, and they often read like success stories where nations and industries, led by brilliant innovators and scientists, overcome austerity and adversity. As readers, we move through many of these bildungsroman-style narratives by turning paper pages, so we know there is a happy, paper-supplied ending. Maybe we even unwrap reams of printing paper emblazoned with arboreal logos so we can print out parts of these stories. Too often, though, the history of papermaking tacitly elides the fact that it took too many innovators far too long to find a suitable substitute for rags.

The Transformation of a Plant

In Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Order, 1450–1830, David McKitterick writes, “The real issues in papermaking lay in the discovery and development of raw materials to meet a growing demand from the printing industry. From the mid-[eighteenth]century onwards—and with mounting urgency as curiosity was fed by need—wood, straw, nettles and other vegetable matter were subjects of experiment and of competition, in a search for a material that was plentiful, cheap and reliable.”²⁷ True as the observation is, it belies an intriguing conundrum: Which was the priority—“urgency” and “need” or vegetable matter that was both “cheap and reliable”? Historically, papermaking technology has been driven not as much by demand for paper as by demand for raw materials that could be obtained cheaply. The history of paper production, like the history of oil production, is a history of scarce nonhuman supply pitted against self-assured human demand. When “cheap and reliable” are the standards, especially where a sense of urgency is in play, a sustainable bargain, one that tends to balance supply and demand in a given ecosystem, is unlikely.

According to a well-known poem quoted by Dard Hunter in Papermaking,

RAGS make paper,

PAPER makes money,

MONEY makes banks,

BANKS make loans,

LOANS make beggars,

BEGGARS make

RAGS.²⁸

In these lines, as in Darnton’s Communications Circuit (discussed in the Introduction), cycles of human use within a social economy are imagined as independent from the natural world. But rags do not simply come to be because of defaulted loans. To better understand rag shortage and the search for a suitable—that is, a cheap—plant substitute, we might tell a less anthropocentric narrative that begins well before the rag stage. “Papermaking is the transformation of a plant,” claims papermaker Robert Possehl.²⁹ It is a concise definition that literally grounds the study of papermaking. Walter Hamady notes that “the main ingredient for all natural paper is simply CELLULOSE FIBER. Most living plants are made up of this fiber and, properly prepared, can produce some kind of paper.”³⁰ So we might say:

SEEDS make plants,

PLANTS make cellulose,

CELLULOSE makes textiles,

TEXTILES make rags,

RAGS make paper.

Often, the story of papermaking is a story of solutions, of what happens after the right plant has been “properly prepared,” but here I wish to slow down and emphasize the problems of cellulose extraction because that part of the process can give us a better understanding of paper’s varied ecologies across time and place.³¹

Cellulose does not often appear in book history scholarship, but it plays a central role in the story of paper’s ecology. Cellulose, by definition, is “an insoluble carbohydrate which is the main structural constituent of the cell walls of plants, and one of the most abundant organic compounds on the earth.”³² Scholars and papermakers alike tend to refer to paper made from straw or linen rag or flax or wood, but those designations might be thought of as shorthand: paper is made from the cellulose present in each of those plants.³³ We use the same sort of shorthand when we refer to dietary fiber: we mean, primarily, cellulose, the part of a plant that is not broken down in the digestive tract. Because book history has tended to tell a more or less anthropocentric story about paper, cellulose rarely merits inclusion in the narrative.³⁴ Mark Bland’s A Guide to Early Printed Books and Manuscripts and John Carter and Nicolas Barker’s ABC for Book Collectors cite “cellulose” once each, for example. In both cases, the resilience of cellulose fibers in forming a durable book object is focal: Bland notes that the “cellulose fibres of paper withstand folding,” and Carter and Barker state in their definition for “de-acidification” that “earlier paper made from rags or esparto grass contains pure uncompounded cellulose, and, short of physical assault, has a very long life.”³⁵ Cellulose, in book history, plays an important, but limited and subdued role.

Turning from the scholarship of book history toward that of artisans, conservators, and scientists, we find cellulose to be the real hero of the story of papermaking. It actually does seem that dramatic at times—as if we have all been aware that Clark Kent plays a key role in the Superman narrative without guessing his true identity. In The Complete Book of Papermaking, paper artist Josep Asunción explains that “what we call paper is actually a thin sheet produced from the physical bonding of previously hydrated fibrous materials, mostly cellulose.”³⁶ In the preface to the English edition of Therese Weber’s The Language of Paper, Jonathan M. Bloom defines paper as “technically a mat of cellulose fibers suspended in water, deposited on a screen, and then dried,” and throughout the book, Weber circles back to a dependency on “raw materials … found locally” and on human struggles to extract cellulose from those raw materials.³⁷ She calls attention, for instance, to the repeated failures of European papermakers to make paper directly from plants rather than from rags and claims that when late nineteenth-century researchers “succeeded in extracting wood cellulose by the sulphite or sulphate process, the use of wood fibre became properly practicable for the first time.”³⁸ Richard L. Hills, whose Papermaking in Britain, 1488–1988 focuses on the industry, technology, and science of paper-making, defines “cellulose” as “the basic substance of paper manufacture.”³⁹

Noting the different ways that academic and artisanal narratives are told, and especially the different beginning points of those narratives, I put what I intend to be productive pressure on the underlaps of academic and artisanal expertise, and I do so with the aim of calling attention to productive overlaps between book history and environmental humanities scholarship.⁴⁰ A key insight into the ecology of paper that arose from thinking with artisans who make paper by hand using historical techniques was the simple but profound realization that careful, lengthy prep work is key to a well-made final product, and perhaps the most important step in this prep work is the process of fiber maceration known as retting. In simple terms, retting is the process of stripping away all but cellulose. Numerous methods were used: papermaker Timothy Barrett writes that “the fermentation methods used by various mills are very likely to have differed as much as the construction and location of the mills themselves.”⁴¹ Barrett emphasizes the specialized skill that went into the essential process of retting, likening it to the work of a good winemaker: “Knowing how to ret rags was not unlike knowing how to ferment grape juice to make good wine.” As with wine, Barrett notes, the methods used to ret paper yielded unique final products: “Retting is a crucial reason for the unique look, feel, and handle of many of the best early book papers … second in importance only to the special nature of the old-rag raw material.”⁴² To make paper by hand, to try to craft even a mediocre replica of the kind of surface book historians encounter by the hundreds and thousands, is to begin to understand that papermaking begins many steps before the vatman dips a mould and deckle into the vat.

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.

Substances Conveying Ideas

In autumn of 1800, an odd book printed on coarse yellow paper began circulating in London: Historical Account of the Substances Which Have Been Used to Describe Events, and to Convey Ideas, From the Earliest Date, to the Invention of Paper by Matthias Koops (see Figure 5). The title page advertised its contents as a history of media told as a history of raw materials from which media were made, a history not of great books and big human ideas, but of nonhuman “Substances” used “to Describe Events, and to Convey Ideas.” The title page also advertised its own material history: “Printed on the First Useful Paper Manufactured Soley [sic] from Straw.”⁴⁷ The vivid yellow hue of the paper is heavily flecked with organic matter. In archival libraries, under direct light, the paper can take on a shimmering quality as brownish flecks spark into gold flashes that appear and disappear as the pages are turned. The pages are rough to the touch, and page thickness is uneven throughout. The author’s claim that the paper is made only from straw is grander than it might sound, and it comes from someone who had a history of making grand claims that did not always prove true. And yet, more than two hundred years later, the paper used in the 1800 first edition and in the expanded 1801 second edition is consistently pliable and strong across numerous copies held in multiple locations.⁴⁸ Koops acknowledges in Substances that his innovation was part of a conversation that had been happening in Europe for nearly a century among figures like Carl Linnaeus, René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, Jacob Christian Schäffer, and a dozen other “scientific men” who had recorded (on rag paper) their “ideas on substitutes for paper-materials.”⁴⁹ Réaumur, observing wasps, realized that paper could be made from wood as early as 1719. Schäffer was making paper from wood and straw (as well as cattails, wasps’ nests, hops, moss, and cabbage stalks, among others) in the 1760s.⁵⁰ “It is surprizing,” writes Koops, “that the observations of [these] authors … should not have been earlier attended to by … intelligent paper-makers, who had the road thus opened to them for their investigation.”⁵¹ Up to this point in the book, Koops has made the point that over and over throughout recorded history, human ingenuity confronts a scarcity of nonhuman materials, always with the same outcome: an abundant substance is made into a recording surface that supersedes what came before it. Koops relies on the authority of scientists to argue that rag paper is ready to be superseded: “These authors have stated, that as cotton, flax, and hemp, are the origin of paper and rags, other vegetables of a tender and pliable nature might probably be converted into mucilaginous pulp, and adopted in the manufacture of Paper; and farther, that those vegetables that are of a brittle and harsh nature, but which can be obtained in large quantities and at moderate prices, might by art and perseverance be made tender, without destroying that quality which is necessary to be retained in paper-stuff.”⁵² Koops set out to make paper from straw not because he believed he could make better, whiter, more beautiful paper from that substance, but because he believed he could make perfectly serviceable paper from straw that was also, though he would not have used the phrase, ecologically sustainable.

FIGURE 4. “Plants to Rags to Paper,” Joshua Calhoun.

FIGURE 5. Title page from Matthias Koops, Historical Account of the Substances Which Have Been Used to Describe Events, and to Convey Ideas, From the Earliest Date, to the Invention of Paper (1800), printed on straw paper. Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Substances is perhaps the most stunning conjunction of form and content that I have held: a book about the history of books printed on mass-producible paper made by replacing scarce, imported rag fibers with locally grown, abundant oat and wheat straw. Koops’s volume introduces itself as a history and a future of the book, and it outlines ways of thinking about book history that upend the most popular ways we have schematized the field of study. Substances is reference book and rare book, information bank and artifact. My home institution’s Special Collections owns two copies: one is in the vault alongside rare books, and the other is in the open reference stacks in the Special Collections library right alongside other modern books on the history of papermaking. The Library of Congress Subject Heading (LCSH) “Papermaking—History” and “Writing materials and instruments” groups Substances with indispensable reference works on paper that I have already cited in this chapter, such as Dard Hunter’s Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft (1947) and Therese Weber’s The Language of Paper: A History of 2000 Years (2007). The paper in Koops is lousy by comparison to the paper in many of the fifteenth-and sixteenth-century holdings, but compared to its neighbors on the reference shelf in Madison, the paper is beautiful, sturdy, and resilient.

Koops’s volume, with its titular emphasis on substances (not substrates), with its odd, coarse, yellow pages, inspires a different kind of story about the history of books and especially paper. Substances refuses to be a transparent medium made of limitless raw materials. On pages visibly made from straw, Koops narrates how various raw materials (trees, stones, metals, wax, bark, leaves, papyrus, skins) have been used historically “to preserve the remembrance of important events.”⁵³ It is a history of things used to convey history. Negotiation among humans and nonhumans is at the heart of Koops’s story; the plant sources never drop from view or fade into the background. Because Koops writes in the midst of serious material scarcity, because the stuff of paper cannot be assumed as it so often is in book history narratives, because Koops himself has a stake in making the paper he describes, he is attuned to its plant origins in ways that we tend to overlook. Substances is a remarkable, and remarkably understudied, resource that deserves renewed attention.

Substances reminds its reader, over and over again, that writing surfaces used as conveyances for human ideas were first nonhuman matter. Koops begins his history of substances used to convey ideas in the ancient past, when “trees were planted, heaps of stone, or unornamented altars and pillars, were erected … to keep up the recollection of past facts.”⁵⁴ As writing and alphabet systems developed, more complex means were used to recollect the past: “Since the art of writing was invented, several materials have been used on which was engraved or written what was wished to be conveyed to posterity,” and in short time, claims Koops, different kinds of substances were used to record different kinds of public and private writing: “A distinction has been made between public records and private writings. For the first; stones, timber, and metals, were chiefly used; and, for the latter, leaves and bark of trees.”⁵⁵ The story that Koops tells may begin as a narrative of diversified formats used to distinguish between private and public records, but eventually, he settles into an arcing narrative in which one substance/substrate supersedes another substance/substrate. “The use of boards was superseded by the use of the leaves of palm, olive, poplar, and other trees,” he writes; then “the custom of writing on leaves of trees was superseded by the use of the raw bark of trees, and the interior bark” (emphasis mine).⁵⁶ Pausing here, he notes that the language of books is rooted in trees: interior bark is called liber in Latin; these barks, rolled up so they could be carried about, are volumen;the word codex “notwithstanding its true meaning is the trunk of a tree … was adopted to describe many sheets of the said bark together.”⁵⁷ Koops devotes some space to discussing various kinds of bark media from various locales, but only after noting that the use of inner bark (liber) is a short step away from making papyrus. In the narrative laid out in Substances, it becomes readily apparent that had northern-growing birch trees been more suitable for making writing substrates than southern-growing papyrus, the history of the book, and perhaps the history of civilization, would be quite different. Ecological availability and scarcity—we might say biodiversity—determine the course of paper and books in Koops’s narrative.

Intriguingly, when Koops turns to a consideration of parchment superseding papyrus, he tells an often-repeated anecdote about Ptolemy/Eumenes, but in a way that emphasizes not only political power, but also ecological scarcity and fear.⁵⁸ In the usual story, Ptolemy wants a bigger, better library in Alexandria than Eumenes has in Pergamus, so he cuts off exports of papyrus (which Koops refers to as “Egyptian Paper,” though he clearly indicates that it is a precursor to paper). However, Koops suggests that Ptolemy’s decision might have been driven by ecological concerns: “It may be that this prohibition was not solely occasioned by jealousy, but from the fear that his dominions … would be again reduced to a state of ignorance for want of Paper, because the plant failed sometimes in unfavourable weather.”⁵⁹ Having been cut off from the raw materials needed to record and convey ideas, the Pergamians, according to Koops, “were therefore obliged to devise other means for making Paper.” In response, they invent parchment, a writing material that “obtained its name from the city of Pergam, or Pergamus … the place where it was invented.”⁶⁰ The narrative of supersession continues: born out of necessity and ecological scarcity, parchment “greatly surpassed the Egyptian Paper in fineness, smoothness, and strength.”⁶¹ Parchment, in Koops’s telling, also surpassed papyrus, because it was made from a reliable, sustainable, abundant, and geographically nonspecific material. The spread of parchment and especially parchment-making, he notes, was far broader than the spread of papyrus because, once learned, the techniques of parchment-making can be practiced in any climate where animals can be raised.

So, according to Substances, boards as a writing medium are superseded by leaves, which are superseded by the inner bark of trees, which are superseded by the rinds of papyrus plants, which are superseded by parchment. The title promises a historical account of substances “From the Earliest Date, to the Invention of Paper,” and at the bottom of page 46, almost exactly halfway through the 91-page volume, Koops turns to paper. His history of paper and papermaking follows the same pattern as his history of substances used before the invention of paper: paper from linen rags superseded paper from cotton rags partially because flax grows more abundantly in Europe. Notably, Koops claims “that the Greeks made use of cotton-paper sooner than the Latins; and that it was brought into Europe by the Greeks, earlier than by the Moors from Spain”; as a result, he says, in Germany cotton paper “was known in the 9th century by the name of Greek parchment.”⁶² That “Greek parchment” would be used to designate cotton paper highlights the recursivity of supersession narratives: the superseding object (paper in this case) makes sense of itself by reference to the presence or memory of the superseded object (parchment).⁶³ Indeed, Koops refers to manuscripts from tenth- to twelfth-century Spain that are “intermixed parchment and thick cotton-paper leaves.” Scarcity is the reason for intermixing, he suggests, but he cannot determine if “cotton paper was scarcer than parchment, or that this mixture was necessary because sufficient parchment could not be obtained.”⁶⁴

The same sort of incomplete supersession happens with cotton and linen paper in Koops’s account. According to Substances, the use of cotton paper in England “continued till the latter end of the 14th century,” he says, before it was “gradually supplanted by linen-paper.”⁶⁵ Here it is hard to miss the agricultural pun, intended or not, that comes into play with the word “supplanted.” But beyond wordplay, there is a literal shift in the direction of replacement. To supersede something is to sit above it; to supplant something is to trip it from below. Cotton paper is, quite literally, tripped up from below by a new plant, flax. And yet, as Koops notes, the change is “gradual,” not sudden. In Fabriano, one of the earliest and most well-known Italian papermaking cities, Koops claims that “cotton might have been some time before mixed with linen-rags, till the superiority of the latter was fully ascertained.”⁶⁶ Koops devotes ample attention to teasing out when linen paper was invented, but it turns out the when is in service of the where: nationalistic disputes abound when it comes to assigning credit for the innovation of linen-based paper. Koops ultimately sides with the view that the earliest-known linen paper was made in Germany in 1308. “It is, therefore likely,” writes Koops, “that Germany has the honour of its [linen paper’s] invention.”⁶⁷ By 1342, linen paper was in use in England, Koops claims, but it was not until the end of the seventeenth century that “the art of making Paper arrived to a great degree of perfection in England.”⁶⁸ But within one hundred years, production speed (and demand) outstripped supply in England, and, as a result, English papermakers had to import rags from Europe, leading to anxieties about the dissemination of nationally beneficial information and even the production of viable banknotes. Koops raises the concern, in contradistinction to the anonymous eighteenth-century writer cited by Hunter, that due to resource shortage, there might not be enough rags to make paper money.⁶⁹

Extraordinary Scarcity

As Koops had already lamented at the beginning of Substances, “The great demands for Paper in this country have rendered it necessary to be supplied from the continent. This supply is extremely precarious, and is likely to be more wanted, as the consumption of Paper increases, because the material, which is the basis of Paper, is not to be obtained in England in sufficient quantity. The evil consequence of not having a due supply of Rags has been the stoppage of a number of Paper-mills.”⁷⁰ According to Koops, though “all Europe has of late years experienced an extraordinary scarcity” of rags, England struggled more than any other country because it relied on raw materials from abroad.⁷¹ Parliament had already responded to rag scarcity by allowing rags, nets, old ropes, and waste paper to be imported duty-free. And yet, claims Koops, such measures were stopgaps, not solutions; in his words, they “cannot sufficiently obviate the lamentable scarcity.”⁷² Koops’s appeal ultimately hinges on the argument that continued rag dependence is shortsighted, as are attempts to fix the problem economically (duty-free imports of raw materials), politically (sanctions on exports of certain materials to certain countries), and socially (appealing to citizens to be better stewards of rags).⁷³ The narrative Koops tells about the past is meant to be instructive: the history of substances used to convey ideas is one of supersession, and so is the future of substances used to convey ideas.

Koops was not the first to try to make paper from straw, and he does not claim to be. His claim, printed on the title page, is that his is the first useful paper made only from straw (with no rags added). By September 1800, the date given at the end of the preface to Substances, Koops had secured two patents related to his work on substitute materials for papermaking: one for extracting ink from printed and written paper, pulping the waste paper, and making new paper (No. 2392, April 28, 1800); and one “for a method of manufacturing paper from straw, hay, thistles, waste, and refuse of hemp and flax, and different kinds of wood and bark” (No. 2433, August 2, 1800).⁷⁴ His motive for printing Substances appears to have been twofold: to prove the success of his project and to appeal to the Crown to protect his trade secrets from foreign theft. By printing the book on straw paper, Koops demonstrates its viability. In numerous copies I have examined, Koops has signed the preface, perhaps to show that straw makes good writing paper as well (see Figure 6). In the latter pages of Substances, Koops claims that he has manufactured “several thousand reams of perfectly clean and white Paper, since the 1st of May, made from old waste, written, and printed Paper.”⁷⁵ His next goal is to make “the most perfect Paper from straw and other vegetables.” The paper “these lines are printed upon” is not yet perfected, he claims, but “this specimen leaves no doubt in my mind, that … I shall make straw-paper in as great perfection as that which is now remanufactured from waste-paper.”⁷⁶ And if the project fails? Koops makes the case that even if straw paper were only good for “pasteboards, packing-paper, and paper-hangings,” it will benefit the nation.⁷⁷ According to Koops, making paper-hangings from English straw has the potential of flipping an upside-down economic model so that, instead of sending money to the Continent for rags, England would be able to manufacture paper-hangings more cheaply and could then sell paper-hangings at a lower rate to European purchasers. Straw paper, Koops argues, is a win-win proposition that can drastically reduce dependence on foreign supply by substituting locally sourced (or, at least, nationally sourced) raw materials.

FIGURE 6. Koops’s signature at the end of the preface to Substances (1800). Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin–Madison.

At the end of Substances, Koops adds a brief, seven-page (two sheets with seven of eight possible sides printed) appendix, which is posed as if it is an afterthought, but stands out to a reader because the paper on which it is printed is clearly not the same as the paper used for the rest of the book. The sheets are more pale brown than yellow, and they are less coarse. Printed on this paper are these words: “The following lines are printed upon Paper made from Wood alone, the produce of this country, without any intermixture of rags, waste paper, bark, straw, or any other vegetable substance.”⁷⁸ Koops had figured out the future of papermaking. He had successfully produced and printed on paper made from wood alone, with no additives. And the paper remains intact in all of the editions I have examined.⁷⁹ Even in 1801, when Koops expanded Substances and printed the main part of some editions on “Paper Re-made from Old Printed and Written Paper” instead of on straw paper, the wood-pulp paper appendix is still present. However, only in the 1800 edition do we find, at the end of the volume, a small ornament that might well be an emblem of Substances as a whole: the image of a gravestone, engraved with the word “FINIS” in front of a chopped-up tree and a setting sun.⁸⁰ The future of paper, as Koops figured out, was to be found in the harvesting of trees.

Looking backward from 1800, Koops sees how bookmaking brought the world to the cusp of the Industrial Revolution; looking forward, he sees the possibility of establishing the manufacture of paper in England using a substance, straw, that is available in a sustainable, abundant supply. The book itself is addressed to King George III and framed as an appeal about licensing and patents more than as a persuasive work of book history scholarship. And yet it is both. But whatever his talent for understanding the history of paper-making, Koops’s own project failed spectacularly. By 1800, he had secured three patents for papermaking—all three for experimental approaches to replacing rags with more abundant raw materials—and he was working at Neckinger paper mill in Bermondsey. By 1801, Koops had established the Straw Paper Manufactory at Millbank in Westminster, the largest paper mill in England. By October 1804, Koops was bankrupt, and the mill’s equipment was on the auction block, “ending the possibility of England challenging the European paper industry by using more easily available materials for making paper.”⁸¹

FIGURE 7. Ornament from the last page of Substances (1800), printed on wood pulp paper. Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Koops’s narrative unsettles the sort of hindsight biases that do not often acknowledge that books are equal parts human ideas and nonhuman materials. The brilliance of Koops’s volume is that it simultaneously demands several kinds of reading, for its pages—the words on them and the paper itself—record a natural history of the book and, especially, of papermaking. When Koops writes about pages made from raw materials, he writes not about substrates, but about substances; not about inevitability, but about potential; not about books or media, but about memorials; not about ecological abundance, but about ecological scarcity. The irony is that Koops ushers papermaking into the industrial age of mass production.⁸² The coarse yellow pages of Substances, the pale brown pages of its wood-pulp appendix, and the story that Koops tells on those pages mark the end of an epoch of hand papermaking. Within a decade of Substances and of the failure of Koops’s paper mill, papermaking would be revolutionized (and industrialized) with the help of bleach and the perfection of papermaking machines. Raw materials would remain problematic and scarce, but by the late nineteenth century, the papermaking industry shifted westward, across the Atlantic Ocean and across the North American continent, as trees became the cheap and reliable plants that could be transformed into paper.⁸³

The untapped resources of the American West inspired belief in the obviousness of what progress was and in a providential mandate to subdue and have dominion. Reproductions of American Progress were not included in nineteenth-century guidebooks to temper optimism. The story of paper is a similarly complicated narrative that, in many histories of paper, easily veers into encomium. One particularly adulatory history of paper imagines an uncomplicated, machine-driven paper utopia: “In less than half a century, the machines have entirely superseded the diminutive hand-mills which sparsely dotted the country, and gigantic establishments have risen up in their places. Paper-mill villages, and banking institutions even, have grown out of this flourishing branch of industrial art, and we behold with satisfaction and amazement, what has been brought about by the aid of a commodity so insignificant in the eyes of the world as linen and cotton rags.”⁸⁴ This is the Chronology of the Origin and Progress of Paper and Paper-Making, printed four years after Gast’s American Progress, and a fitting companion to it, for the story of early handmade paper is not pre-industrial, but proto-industrial. It is a story of questionable progress toward cheap raw materials and cheap labor—“cheap at any cost,” to cite Wendell Berry.⁸⁵

Spinning Wheels

Compared to Taylor’s seventeenth-century poem of praise for hemp and flax and to Thoreau’s paean to the commodities moving across nineteenth-century train tracks and even to Darnton’s far more recent Communications Circuit, Koops offers a striking perspective on the scarcity and abundance of substances used to record ideas. Reading Taylor and Thoreau, one could be forgiven for assuming that raw materials were always there—somewhere. The second half of Taylor’s Praise of Hemp-seed celebrates paper made from hemp and flax rags as a “rich commodity” worthy of excessive praise because, as Taylor puns, “all the world yeelds matter to my Muse.” That is, plant matter in the form of cellulose from around the globe yields paper, which in turn yields poetic matter about the global importance of paper. Taylor goes on (and on):

No Empire, Kingdome, Region, Prouince, Nation,

No Principality, Shire, nor Corporation:

No country, county, city, hamlet, towne,

But must vse paper, either white or browne.

No Metropolitane, or gratious Primate

No village, pallace, cottage, function, climate,

No age sex, or degree the earth doth beare,

But they must vse this seed to write, or weare.⁸⁶

Reading Taylor, paper users must have known the story of paper made from plants was not so simple, direct, or domestic as his commendatory lines suggest. Perhaps Renaissance writers and readers knew about the fraught supplies of foreign paper the way we know as a culture, but do not operate as though we believe, that we will not always be able to rely on cheap, foreign fossil fuels. In an imaginary dialogue about the state of the country, printed in London in 1581, one of the interlocutors explains that “there was paper made a while within the realme,” but that the papermaker could not make his paper “as good cheape as it came from beyond the sea.”⁸⁷ The papermaker referred to was probably John Tate, the first papermaker in England around the end of the fifteenth century, but the complaint is the same made by Matthias Koops, the first straw and wood pulp papermaker in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

When Taylor considers the origins of paper, how a plant like hemp (or flax) cycles through society and then “to paper doth conuert,” he is drawn to think about how human stories and plant stories come to be interwoven:

For when I thinke but how is paper made

Into Philosophy I straight waies wade:

How here, and there, and euery where lies scatter’d,

Old ruind rotten rags, and ropes, all tatter’d.⁸⁸

Taylor goes on to imagine several specific origin stories in which paper becomes a rhetorical under-text that inflects and in some cases subverts the over-text. A Brownist’s “zealous ruffe,” for instance, might “Be turnd to paper, and a Play writ in’t.”⁸⁹ But the most famous lines that Taylor records in this poem imprinted into the fibers of plant-based paper are these:

In paper, many a Poet now suruiues

Or else their lines had perish’d with their liues.

Old Chaucer, Gower, and Sir Thomas More,

Sir Philip Sidney, who the Lawrell wore,

Spencer, and Shakespeare did in Art excell,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Forgetfulnesse their workes would ouerrun,

But that in paper they immortally

Do liue in spight of death, and cannot die.⁹⁰

Taylor’s lines constitute the first posthumous mention of Shakespeare’s name in print.⁹¹ As Adam Hooks notes, Taylor gives precedence to “the material and economic context”: Shakespeare defies death “because individual copies of his plays and poems were printed, bought, and sold.”⁹² Shakespeare, like the other poets listed, survives “in paper”—a claim that subtly plays with Shakespeare’s own observation in Sonnet 15 that “men as plants increase.”⁹³ As I discuss in the next chapter, the connection between poet and plant is not chiefly metaphorical but material, and it is recognizable in the handmade pages of early books in the botanical form of visible flecks of plant matter.

Thoreau’s paper, by comparison, appears dull. Though still composed of rags, it is “wove” paper made by machine, and the pages of the journals he kept while at Walden Pond tend toward homogeneity.⁹⁴ Mark Bland writes that “modern paper”—with which Thoreau’s paper shares many visual characteristics even though the nature of his pages shares more ecological characteristics with Taylor’s and with Shakespeare’s paper—“is mass produced and production methods seek to minimise differences … in effect, the paper either effaces or standardises the history within it.”⁹⁵ At the Morgan Library, where I looked into the pages of some of Thoreau’s journals along with curator and paper historian John Bidwell, I became especially aware of how much can be effaced in the homogeneity of modern paper. I was struggling to read Thoreau’s terrifically scribbled handwriting and defaulted to the most basic of paleographical skills: striving to positively identify unique letterforms as a basis for decoding full words. On the page shown in Figure 8, one letterform immediately stood out toward the middle, left margin, a capital letter that had to be a Z. And suddenly, out of the mire of Thoreau’s scrawling on recycled plant-fiber rags, Zilpah White emerged. Zilpah White, the former slave whose Loyalist master abandoned her to fate when he fled the country in 1775.⁹⁶

FIGURE 8. Page from Henry David Thoreau’s journal while at Walden Pond. MA 1302.7. Thoreau, Henry David, 1817–1862. Journal: autograph manuscript: Walden [Concord], [1845 July–Winter 1845/1846], p. [87] “Over eastward of my bean field….” Reproduced by permission of the Morgan Library and Museum.

White had gone to Walden Woods not to suck the marrow out of life, but to survive independently, and she did so with a flax wheel. In Black Walden: Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord, Elise Lemire explains that White’s former masters had a “spinning garret” for “spinning flax into the linen fibers that were then woven into fine table linens and other markers of wealth and gentility.”⁹⁷ Thoreau, telling White’s story decades after her death, writes that “she spun linen for the townsfolk, making the Walden Woods ring with her shrill singing.”⁹⁸ Zilpah White’s story is inextricably connected with the story I am telling about paper, and the role she played in the history of plants as rags as paper is largely hidden from view. “When slavery ended,” writes Lemire, “at least some former slave women were given one of their master’s spinning wheels as a means of providing for themselves.”⁹⁹ It was a short-term solution, however, for the work these women could do on small spinning wheels would soon be overwhelmed by industrial factories that could make linen cloth more quickly and more reliably and sell it more cheaply.¹⁰⁰

Paper has a serendipitous and romantic and compelling and complex backstory, one that can begin to seem so obvious in hindsight, one that marches across the pages of history like Columbia across the bountiful landscape of the American West. Rag shortage becomes a useful foil in many histories of paper, for it creates dramatic tension while simultaneously introducing human-interest stories of ingenuity, pluck, and thrift. Rag shortage is certainly one part of the story, but an overemphasis on rags has made it easy to forget that rags, like books or clean drinking water or oil or cucumbers, come from somewhere and something. It is true that England lagged behind the rest of Europe when it came to paper production and “relied on imported paper for almost all of its writing and printing needs before the end of the seventeenth century.”¹⁰¹ It is true that when Richard Tottell, printer of law books and of the first anthology of English poetry and charter member of the Stationer’s Company, petitioned for exclusive rights to papermaking in England in 1585, he “accused the French of cornering the supply of rags.”¹⁰² But it is also true that, as D. C. Coleman observed over sixty years ago, English rag shortage could be attributed to three factors: “the widespread use of wool … the absence of a native linen industry … and to the fact that such linen rags as were available tended to be exported, particularly to France.”¹⁰³ Stories about paper have long focused on the human elements in the unbalanced rag-shortage equation Coleman describes: wool use, linen industry, rag exports. However, when we read between the lines—and beyond the linen—we realize that “rag shortage” is a euphemism for raw material shortage. Hidden below the canopy of the familiar, anthropocentric narrative in which “rags make paper” are dense understories of raw materials, of localized biodiversity, of bruised plant stalks and boiled animal hooves and of aching, dehumanized bodies. If we look closely, we begin to find stories in the fibers of historical paper that prompt us to recalculate the costs of supposed cheapness.