Material Histories of Paper
Abstract
Paper is a material that is both mundane and omnipresent. Despite increasing efforts towards digitization and the promises of a paperless world, it remains a part of our daily lives. Following in the theoretical footsteps of the “material turn,” this anthology proposes to approach the history of paper from the perspective of its materialities. This means a consideration of paper as more than just a writing surface that carries marks and messages, but as a material whose at times contradictory physical qualities are in themselves significant: fragile yet robust, ephemeral yet permanent. Considering such characteristics draws attention to the presence of paper in the world and highlights its many roles in human society: in the making of things and infrastructures, the maintenance of relationships, the safekeeping of memory and history, and much more.
Taking advantage of the dynamic and trans-disciplinary research on paper, this collections is structured around five chapter themes—“Creating Paper,” “Moving Paper,” “Organizing (with) Paper,” “Manipulating Paper,” and “Enduring Paper”—each of which sheds a different light on the way paper acts in the world and how we act with paper. While these chapters do not exhaust the history of paper, they aim to span different periods and cultural contexts to show the magnitude of paper as one of the infrastructures of human society.
Introduction
Paper, our age-old friend, accompanies us, in the most diverse of ways, in every gesture of daily existence, in the most serious and the most trivial occasions of private and public life, in the pleasures of the body as well as those of the mind, in front of the representatives of authority as well as in parties without a tomorrow: it is the ephemeral and the permanent, the meaningful and the insignificant, the precious and the disposable, memory and oblivion.
— Pierre-Marc de Biasi1
In the song “Les p’tits papiers” (1965), written and composed by Serge Gainsbourg, the singer Régine recites a refrain where all sorts of papers are listed: tissue paper, blotting paper, rice paper, Armenian paper, corn paper, velvet paper, flypaper, silver paper, banknote paper, adhesive paper, carbon paper, machine paper, music paper, drawing paper, golden paper. What's more, these papers do all sorts of things: they console, speak, warm, burn... In this whirl of paper, madness mingles with death, money, and love. But Régine and Gainsbourg are not impressed, and the song ends with relentless nonchalance: “Floral Paper / Or we don't care.”
A quick look in a dictionary2 likely reveals that the list from the song could stretch on, and on: familiar items like newspaper, crepe paper, paper towels, and kraft paper rub shoulders with less common (or more outdated) items like tracing paper, onion skin paper, parchment paper, and blueprint paper. There are even a few impostors, such as liquid paper or silver paper which are not paper at all. What's more, we can’t help but marvel at the richness of expressions that include the word “paper”: when something is serious, we commit it to paper, but something of no value is not worth the paper it’s written on. We can unmask paper tigers, put pen to paper, get caught in a paper chase. Someone who does boring work is a paper pusher, and being given one’s walking papers is usually not good news.
What’s striking about these endless lists is the breadth of paper’s meanings: paper is present at once at the scale of our hands, small and insignificant, like the sheets of paper we handle every day (printer paper, Post-it notes, shopping lists, pages of books, metro tickets, cardboard boxes left on our doorsteps), but also on the vast scales of centuries and cultures, the repository of knowledge, history, memory, monetary value, the index of administration, bureaucracy, and our identities. We care for some papers while others we treat carelessly; we store some and burn others. As we oscillate between these attitudes and material treatments, what remains unwavering is that paper is an enduring infrastructure of human society.
Despite its ubiquity, paper might well be one of the most invisible and underestimated of contemporary technologies. Last century’s call for the “paperless office” has yet to fully take hold, and our work environments have, if anything, become hybrids of digital and analogue – one everyday example is the extent to which the form and logic of paper documents still shape their digital versions3. For every tap of our banking card to make a payment is still the relic of a contract or deed that must be signed by hand. For every article espousing the affordances of reading on screens is a reader happily grasping on to their beautifully printed niche magazine. And if we have digitized our paperwork, newspapers, and diplomas, we are still firmly living amidst paper logics and techniques, surrounded with reminders of the transversal and formative ways that paper has shaped modern societies. And yet, because it is an “old” technology, paper has become largely absent in the futuristic and novelty-driven discourse that animates technology prognosticators and enthusiasts or, at best, a material problem on its way to becoming digitized.
Many of today’s paper forms, practices, and systems were introduced centuries ago, when paper first became a widely accessible and available resource. Looking back is therefore essential to make sense of the present’s attachment to paper and its ongoing application of paper imaginaries. It is impossible to put an exact date on the invention of paper: the earliest specimens, found in Central Asia, date back to at least the 2nd century BCE while common lore has it that it was invented in China by Ts'ai-Lun in 105 BCE. What we know for certain is that it first became widely used in the 4th century, also in China. It then moved westward to the Near East (probably using the Silk Road), where it took hold in the 8th century4. In this migration, as with those that will follow, the materials used to make paper would change to adapt to the local environment and its available resources; while in China early paper was made from mulberry, hemp, and China grass, in the Arab peninsula — where the soil is arid — linen and hemp rags became its primary material. Paper spread further west and northwards across Europe, starting with Spain and Italy in the 11th century and became so common by the early modern period that Europe was already then described as “a culture of paper”5.
By acknowledging the often fleeting nature of our attention to the various papers that that make up the fabric of daily life, of modern society, and, more generally, of the human experience, this anthology proposes to reflect, from a historical perspective, on the material manifestations of paper. By shifting our mode of attention from what is on the paper — images, texts — to the paper itself — colour, texture, grain, volume, flexibility, porosity, format, dimensions, thickness — the texts in this anthology make visible paper’s presence in the world. Through its manufacturing processes and its constantly renewed uses and meanings, paper transformed societies. The ambition of this anthology is to provide a list of texts and resources united by the common thread of paper's material histories.
Approaching Paper Materialities
The proposition of our anthology is situated within a particular moment in the humanities and social sciences, particularly in a paradigmatic shift that media philosopher John Durham Peters refers to as the move from structuralism to infrastructuralism. Departing from the analysis of systems of signs and meanings, which was the focus of structuralism, Peters suggests infrastructuralism as a “doctrine of environments and small differences, of strait gates and the needle’s eye, of things not understood that stand under our worlds”6.
The concept of infrastructuralism echoes what is known as the “material turn,” a convergence of approaches around the questions of materiality that has been influential in many different disciplines. A number of theoretical approaches, such as critical materialism, new materialism or object-oriented ontology, have been deployed in a space of interdisciplinary reflection7. In media studies, various traditions have shaped conceptual tools for the analysis of media forms by bracketing the interpretation of meaning and focusing rather on material elements. The well-established scholarly traditions of Canadian media theory8 and German media theory9 have argued that the materialities of communications are an integral component to our experience of media and mediation, and offer renewed possibilities for thinking the human experience (and its interactions with the non-human). These theoretical frameworks are often referred to as foundational paradigms for research engaged in the objects, stuff, and things of media studies, including logistical media studies, critical infrastructure studies, elemental media philosophy, environmental media studies, and object lessons10. Likewise, disciplines including geography, history, information science, archival studies, cinema studies, anthropology, literature and the arts, science and technology studies, and design, have a history of turning to objects as an important component of research and knowledge production. This turn to the material has been a far-reaching and sustained process that is in many ways reshaping research agendas, theories, fields, and even disciplines.
The material turn has also been reflected in the ways that recent research by scholars, authors, librarians, archivists, and artists have treated paper: paper as substrate, symbol, and environmental presence in the literary studies and the arts11 ; paper examined through journalistic case studies of the pulp and paper mill industry12 and papermaking histories focused on infrastructure and political economy13; paper through information practices themselves14; as surface and medium by art historians15 or documents taken up through legal scholarship focusing on paper trails16; as an index of governmentality in certain anthropological projects17; as the manifestation of gendered work and labour18. Despite the differences in their approach, these works attest that paper is transformative as it performs social, political, economic, cultural, and epistemological functions.
In addition to these recent developments related to the material turn in the humanities and social sciences, several disciplines, such as book history, archival science, and bibliography19 have long developed tools and built significant knowledge about paper and its materialities. Bibliographers, for example, have accumulated expertise in dating and locating paper, particularly through the study and inventory of watermarks and other tools of codicology and forensic bibliography. Academic associations around the world and several research groups have organized around the study of paper, including the International Association of Paper Historians (IPH), l’Association française pour l’Histoire et l’Étude du Papier et des Papeteries (AFHEPP) and the British Association of Paper Historians (BAPH)20, to name just a few. Numerous academic journals and special issues have also shed light on the long and rich history of paper, while several bibliographies provide a transdisciplinary overview of research on paper.21 The general public can become familiar with the history of paper through various exhibitions presented in museums, archives, or private collections, which provide access to local narratives about the paper industry, paper arts, or the instruments, materials, and techniques of paper-making.
We are therefore far from the first to recognize the dynamism of research on paper as a material, or to acknowledge the analytical, explanatory, and descriptive richness that paper offers. Our contribution lies in the particular focus that has guided the creation of this anthology: we have selected texts that highlight the importance of paper as a material or object and consider it in many of its diverse forms and functions. Paper is not just a medium for texts: it decorates walls, is folded to create shapes, serves as packaging, is the product of industrial and artisanal practices, is a resource bought, traded, and recycled, can burn or become a substrate for fungi and mold, and is subject to preservation efforts, as well as being an object of art and craft. Paper produces and sustains relationships; it is the medium for scholarly and literary works, but it is also found in kitchens, hospitals, offices, banks, subway seats, and ticket counters. This is why we agree with author Ian Sansom, that “we live in a paper world.”22
The creation of this Living Book stems from the Paperology collective, a group for collaborative reading and activities on paper founded in autumn 2020 by the editors of this anthology. The creation of several reading lists23 was one of Paperology’s projects that has directly led to this Living Book. Given the vast amount of work available on the subject, putting together an anthology on the history of paper can never be exhaustive or final. Without listing all of the decisions that shaped our final selection of resources, a few of the questions we faced are worth mentioning. First, the anthology we propose does not have a single disciplinary anchor and thus reflects the transdisciplinary nature of research on paper. The places from which paper has been studied are numerous and heterogeneous, further highlighting the ubiquity of paper in various fields of human activity. If it were institutionalized, a field of “paper studies” would be intrinsically interdisciplinary, similar to cultural studies or gender studies, intersecting multiple academic traditions as well as the realms of arts, architecture, politics, and technology. Second, it is impossible to produce an exhaustive list of paper research. This anthology is therefore not a comprehensive presentation of work on paper materialities, but we hope it will serve as a point of entry, whether for those overwhelmed by the breadth of literature on paper and paper objects, for those looking to build a course or seminar on paper, or simply for readers who are exploring paper worlds for the first time. Indeed, once you begin to approach research through the prism of paper, you discover that it is, as in everyday life, always already there.
The Structure of this Living Book
With these issues in mind, we have chosen to structure this anthology around verbs that evoke actions: “Creating Paper,” “Moving Paper,” “Organizing (with) Paper,” “Manipulating Paper,” and “Enduring Paper.” Varying the perspectives—exploring how paper is made, what paper does to us, and what we do with paper—suggests that paper is by turns and all at once both object and subject. Some themes therefore appear in multiple chapters, as they traverse the worlds of paper without exhausting their meanings or implications. Each verb also contains a wealth of meanings, and each chapter challenges the others: to create paper, for example, is at once to invent it, to manufacture it, and to look at all the consequences that its manufacturing processes can have. Organizing paper involves, among other things, establishing the conditions for the persistence of paper over time (through the creation of objects, monuments, and places for this purpose), but also refers to the necessary circulation networks organized by paper. We could provide a long list of possible resonances and connections between the different chapters, but for the purposes of this introduction, it is probably enough to note that they are abundant.
Other considerations have also shaped the selection of the texts in this anthology, including the inclusion of texts in French and in English, and those describing the uses or production of paper in different geographical regions and at different times. However, it should be noted that the order of the texts does not seek to trace a chronological arc of the history of paper: the division is rather thematic, which allows us to go back and forth between different historical periods in a way that we hope will be fertile and stimulating. Furthermore, as it is a raison d’être of the Living Books series, our choices were guided by the availability of freely accessible texts. Invariably this also means that significant authors and works could not be included. Then again, since we are on an online platform, we were able to include complementary resources for each chapter: these include links to videos, websites, articles, blog posts, artworks, or digital humanities projects. Another indication of the breadth of interest in paper, these complementary resources can serve as teaching tools or, simply, an entertaining collection of curiosities.
Chapter 1: Creating Paper
Where does paper come from? How, when, and where did it emerge? Paper has been the subject of transfer, appropriation, diffusion, adaptation, fashion, and oblivion. In this first chapter, we propose a number of resources covering the emergence of “the momentous invention”24 that is paper, as an object and as a concept. Not just any surface for inscription will do: while there’s a certain consensus that paper is a material made from a pulp of plant fibers, spread out and dried into thin sheets, other surfaces on which inscriptions are left, such as birch bark25, papyrus or bamboo, can be approached as “almost-papers”, as Dupuigrenet-Desroussilles nicely calls them in La galaxie Tsaï-Loun. Several of the texts in this first chapter set out the main milestones in the history of paper. Readers will find an excerpt from a classic in the history of the book, written by French historians Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin in 1958. As for Dupuigrenet-Desroussilles and Bloom, each offers a specific account of the development and circulation of paper, demonstrating that it has been, from the outset, a global story.
Questioning how paper is created does not stop at the matter of its “invention,” so this chapter offers several texts that shed light on the issues related to papermaking. Making paper involves not only shaping a material, but also requires knowledge, techniques, tools, methods, and gestures. Bloom’s text, for example, discusses the history of the circulation of papermaking techniques in the early Middle Ages. Similarly, the “creation” of paper must be continually renewed and seems never-ending: since its lifespan is limited, paper only survives if the knowledge and technologies surrounding its production endure. Through this history, we also see that paper is a malleable material that adapts to the resources available in certain regions and at certain times26. Paper production has thus been subject to improvements, trends, and regional variations. Artisans and industrial paper manufacturers alike have refined their production techniques and, in the process, left traces of their methods in the paper itself. On this matter Georgina Wilson offers an insightful history of watermarks through an analysis of the folio Sejanus His Fall (1605): in doing so she underscores the work of papermakers and ragpickers who provide the raw material on which the text is written. The case of Dutch azure blue paper produced in the 18th century, discussed in Dena Goodman’s text, is another compelling episode in the history of papermaking: this characteristic colour made the production methods brilliantly visible.
Finally, creating paper also has industrial, social, and environmental costs and implications and the last texts in this chapter address the exploitation of resources, whose transformation into paper depends on workers and industries. We move here to the North American continent to explore the production of paper money from rags in the United States, as described in the text by Jonathan Senchyne27, as well as the production of paper from Canada’s trees (see the text by Aleksandra Kaminska and Rafico Ruiz and the short film by de LaRoche produced by the National Film Board of Canada).
Chapter 2: Moving Paper
It is almost a cliché in communication studies to say that paper is a medium with a “spatial bias.” By the concept of “bias,” Canadian economist Harold Innis (who would inspire some of Marshall McLuhan’s theories) sought to explain the impact of writing media on the exercise of power and on types of political organization28. For instance, writing on clay would favour organizations that persisted over time and maintained continuity in their systems of thought, whereas writing on paper would favour the exercise of power across space, leading to centralization and bureaucracy. Innis’s proposition highlights one of paper’s primary functions: its ability to circulate. More ephemeral, fragile, and unstable than other media, paper shapes through its lightness and mobility.
Chapter 2, “Moving Paper,” explores various aspects of this notion of circulation, notably through different moments in paper's life cycle. The movement of paper as a resource, manufactured and sold, is addressed in texts by Daniel Bellingradt and Céline Gendron. The paper trade relies on transport networks, often transnational, which are sometimes also used for other goods. These studies, which combine economic, political, cultural, and administrative history, show the extent to which the paper trade was based on vast systems of exchange. A second perspective in this chapter examines the circulation of paper as a medium for long-distance communication. Whether in the form of trade cards (see the text by Philippa Hubbard), letters, reports, passports, or indulgences, papers of various formats and for different purposes crossed private and public spaces, are exchanged from hand to hand, or borrow material infrastructures that enable them to travel. The importance of paper as a means of long-distance communication can ultimately also be seen in its infrastructure. The digital cartography project Gossamer Network seeks to make this visible by showing the material elements that form the backbone of a nascent American postal system.
It should be noted, however, that the movement of paper is often concealed, and sometimes even deliberately absent: it is the diary we hope will never fall into the hands of a reader, the sales contract quickly put out of sight, the greeting cards kept in an old shoebox. Archives and libraries are the key places for preserving culture and knowledge on paper, one of the privileged media through which we can question the past. Preserving paper erodes its circulation: it immobilizes paper to ensure its endurance over time29. Heather Blum’s text, Dead Letter Reckoning, sheds light on this tension between mobility and fixity: 19th century navigators of the polar regions recorded the details of their expeditions by leaving letters and reports in fixed locations. The circulation of these documents remains latent, demonstrating the challenge of overcoming the limits of time as well as space.
Chapter 3 : Organizing (with) Paper
Among paper’s many qualities, a notable one is its ability to pile-up. The availability and affordability of paper paved the way to administrative and bureaucratic practices, and the neverending management of paperasse (the paper of paperwork) has kept us busy ever since30. Paper begat more paper as face-to-face communication and diplomacy were replaced by letters and documents. Paper has been used for administration and official documents from its outset, but it truly flourished as a tool for state governance, religious authority, and the business of accounting when it arrived in the Arabic peninsula. While paper was used in the Middle Ages in Europe, it is in the early modern period that it became commonplace, with the largest of organizations progressively turning to a rule by paper: kingdoms, empires, religious societies, and corporations became enthusiastic record-keepers, creating paper trails for their affairs31. A notorious case of the period is that of the “Paper King,” Phillip II of Spain32, who received and produced so much paper that the enthralling promise of being able to gather everything rather produced a feeling many of us know too well — the overwhelm of information overload (a sentiment that traverses time, as it is psychedelically illustrated by the 1967 video, Paperwork Explosion). It was at this time that, in Europe, paper became increasingly used in everyday life, and not just by the elite: for letters, bills, contracts, posters, pamphlets, ballots, and much more. This was the “age of paper,” a time when “[p]aper, as never before, became the transactional medium; the repository of personal, communal, and institutional memory; the avenue of communication; the lifeblood of bureaucracies; and the foundation and residue of learning”33.
Two large problems emerged from this abundance of paper. First, how did we organize all the paper that was now being churned out in the name of information and record-keeping? And second, how did paper do all this work of organizing? The challenge of storage and retrieval was addressed through solutions large and small. At the individual level, we might consider the many types of “aggregation books” that helped people keep various bits of paper in more or less logical ways. These included commonplace books, scrapbooks, recipe books (see text by Elaine Leong) or writers’ notebooks (see text by Claire Bustarret)34. In the organized activities and spaces of work, we developed specialized paper things such as calling cards, rolodexes, files, folders and their cabinets (see text by Craig Robinson); while at larger scales still we saw the rise of institutional and state archives, in which we would deposit the traces of governance35. With this accumulation of paper also came the need for systems of retrieval: simple ones like alphabetization but also more ambitious and consequential types of ordering such as taxonomies and classification schemes (such as those of Paul Otlet), or what we would today call information management36.
Paper became an unparalleled organizational tool in part because it allowed for standardization. Paper’s affordances and availability facilitated the production of standard documents such as certificates or identification papers, many of which would become official, meaningful, or otherwise valuable through their form (these are the papers that come to mind when we hear “Papers please!”). This performance of authority through the materiality and aesthetics of bureaucratic paper is at the heart of Julien Bonhomme’s text on religious “passports” in the Congo. Paper also proved to be the right substrate for new techniques and logics of format and inscription, including ledgers, receipts, blank forms or, as Liam Cole Young explains, lists37. Through all these systems for paper organization we also see the ways that paper organizes us — our ways of thinking and remembering, our forms and hierarchies of governance, our daily lives and identities, our production of knowledge, our societies and its imaginaries.
Chapter 4: Manipulating Paper
The texts in Chapter 4, “Manipulating Paper,” highlight some of the material qualities of paper and, in particular, how a sheet of paper is often an invitation to be touched and manipulated: it can be folded, pierced, perforated, torn, pinned, sculpted, cut, slit, crumpled. Here we see the emergence of an intimate relationship between our hands and paper, which also shows just how expressive paper can be, far beyond the words or images that can be written or printed on it. For example, In the Valentine’s Day cards from the second half of the 19th century described by Christina Michelon, it is the tactility of the paper that creates emotion, rather than its very generic messages. Paper is here expressive in itself, and it is this quality that some artists seize upon38, whether they are making book sculptures or playing with the varieties of patterns created by cutting, folding, and collaging39 (see Adam Smyth’s text and interviews with artists Myriam Dion and Alexandre Melay). Many artists move away from the page as a flat space, and invest all the dimensions of paper, including those created by its absence — the artist Myriam Dion likes to describe her patient cutting work with the French verb “ajourer,” meaning that she seeks to highlight paper’s ability to let light through. But paper’s expressivity can also be political, as seen in Patricia Crain’s text on ballot papers, or even religious, as in the case of the paper offerings burned in Hong Kong as documented by Janet Lee Scott. Thinking of paper in close association with the hand (as hand-made) therefore goes beyond the question of papermaking (artisanal or industrial), but also evokes all the gestures or “making”40 that paper suggests. Those mentioned in this chapter illustrate a whole range of knowledge and skills (or know-how) acquired through the manipulation of paper, in both domestic and scholarly spheres, or precisely at the confluence of the two41.
Chapter 5: Enduring Paper
The final chapter, “Enduring Paper,” explores the past and future trajectories of paper. The texts outline a tension between destruction and preservation. Curiously enough, paper is both eminently fragile and surprisingly robust. There are numerous threats to the physical integrity of paper artifacts: they can be shredded into fragments by a voracious machine (as discussed by Sarah Blacker), deliberately torn (as illustrated by the work of Maureen Flint), or unintentionally damaged, and are subject to various biodeterioration processes,42 whether devoured by parasites, at the mercy of water, ambient humidity, fire, or mold43. But the boundaries between the life and death of paper are far from clear: when exactly does paper begin, and when does it end? Paper seems to be at the heart of many transformation processes, both before and after what we initially conceive as its primary uses as a documentary medium. Indeed, paper has long been the product of what we would today call recycling, as it was made from rags—textiles that had reached the end of their useful life and were subject to intense recovery and reuse activities. After being used as a documentary medium, paper can be reused in a number of ways, for scribbling notes on the back or in the margins, as wrapping paper or as material destined for recycling. Throughout these transformations, destruction and survival intertwine44. As Malcolm Walsby’s text shows, in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries, books that were deemed unnecessary or of lesser value were disassembled and reused (here to reinforce a cover, there to repair a fragile page), allowing book historians today to reconstruct these works, which would never have reached us otherwise.
The texts in this section also outline a tension between ephemeral and permanent papers. On one hand, the catch-all category of “ephemera” (sometimes referred to as “vieux papiers” in French) encompasses a heterogeneous collection of papers that share the common trait of not being subject to the same efforts of organization, collection, and preservation as books45. These “non-books,” whether playing cards, advertising leaflets, greeting cards, subway or show tickets, raise tricky questions of conceptual categorization, archiving and conservation policies, as discussed in the text by Olivier Belin and Florence Ferran. Lucie Favier examines the challenges of paper preservation at the other end of the spectrum, in the coordination efforts required to establish an international ISO standard for “permanent paper.” To these various paradoxes of paper—fragile yet robust, ephemeral yet permanent—we can add the cost of its persistence over time: to preserve memory, we store manuscripts, books, and documents in environments with strictly controlled atmospheres, the environmental costs of which are being increasingly questioned.
* * *
All the texts and resources presented in this anthology bear witness to a vibrant history of paper. While this anthology takes a historical approach, this does not mean that paper is behind us. The many contemporary uses and practices of paper will continue to populate the material histories we outline here, just as Chinese papermakers, Italian merchants, and Canadian forests did in centuries gone by.
Finally, we are keenly aware of the irony of presenting an anthology on paper in an entirely digital format. All the texts gathered here are indeed available online, and it is likely that most readers will encounter them through screens, thus missing out on the tactile experience of paper: its smell, textures, and fragility as a lived experience. We hope that this absence will be productive, allowing readers to approach paper differently—perhaps with a hint of wonder, a moment of suspended curiosity—the next time they hold a sheet of paper in their hands.
1 Biasi, Pierre-Marc de: Le papier, fragile support de l’essentiel, in: Les Cahiers de médiologie 4 (2), Paris 1997, p. 7–17. Online: <https://doi.org/10.3917/cdm.004.0007>, accessed: 04.07.2024. [Our translation]
2 Druide informatique: Paper, in: Antidote Dictionnaire, accessed: 24.05.2024.
3 See, Gitelman, Lisa: Paper Knowledge. Toward a Media History of Documents, Durham 2014 or Dourish, Paul: The Stuff of Bits. An Essay on the Materialities of Information, Cambridge (MA) 2017. Online: <https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/10999.001.0001>, accessed: 04.07.2024.
4 Hunter, Dard: Papermaking. The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft, New York 1943. Some additional histories of paper include Fowler, Caroline O.: The Art of Paper. From the Holy Land to the Americas, New Haven 2019; Kurlansky, Mark: Paper. Paging Through History, New York 2016; Bloom, Jonathan M.: Paper Before Print. The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World, New Haven 2001; Da Rold, Orietta: Paper in Medieval England. From Pulp to Fictions, Cambridge 2020; Weber, Therese: The Language of Paper. A History of 2000 Years, Singepore 2008; Müller, Lothar: White Magic. The Age of Paper, Cambridge, UK 2015; Baker, Cathleen Ann: From the Hand to the Machine. Nineteenth-Century American Paper and Mediums. Technologies, Materials, and Conservation, Ann Arbor 2010; For examples in French, see Polastron, Lucien X.: Le papier. 2000 ans d’histoire et de savoir-faire, Paris 1999; Laulhère, Catherine; Dubus, Thierry: III. Le papier, in: La fabrication, Paris 2012, p. 41–56. Online: <https://www.cairn.info/la-fabrication--9782765410133-p-41.htm>, accessed: 04.07.2024; Salmon, Xavier; Hundsbuckler, Victor; Noujai, Souraya: Histoires de Papier, Abu Dhabi 2022. To explore paper history through the archives, see for example: Les supports de l’écrit, BnF Les essentiels, <https://essentiels.bnf.fr/fr/livres-et-ecritures/formes-et-usages-des-livres/74c24a4a-ad1c-415e-918b-c8d336b4f3a6-supports-ecrit>, accessed: 04.07.2024.
5 Dover, Paul: The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge (UK) 2021, p. 40.
6 Peters, John Durham: The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media, Chicago 2015, p. 33.
7 See for example, Barad, Karen: Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham 2007; Bennett, Jane: Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham 2010; Carlile, Paul; Nicolini, Davide; Langley, Ann; Tsoukas, Haridimos: How Matter Matters : Objects, Artifacts, and Materiality in Organization Studies, Oxford 2013; Coole, Diana; Frost, Samantha: New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics, Durham 2010; Dolphijn, Rick; van der Tuin, Iris: New Materialism Interviews & Cartographies, London 2013; Parikka, Jussi: New Materialism as Media Theory : Medianatures and Dirty Matter, in: Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 9(1), p. 95-100. Online: <https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2011.626252>, accessed: 14.10.2024.
8 Innis, Harold: Empire and Communications. Toronto 1950; McLuhan, Marshall: Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, London 1964.
9 Kittler, Friedrich: Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Redwood 1990; Parikka, Jussi: What is Media Archaeology, Cambridge (UK) 2012; Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey: Kittler and the Media, Hoboken, 2013.
10 Cubitt, Sean: Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies, Durham 2017; Hu, Tung-Hui: Black Boxes and Green Lights: Media, Infrastructure, and the Future at Any Cost, in: English Language Notes 55 (1), 2017, p. 81-88, Online: <https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-55.1-2.81>, accessed: 14.10.2024; Parks, Lisa; Starosielski, Nicole, eds.: Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures, Champaign 2015; Peters, John Durham: The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media, Chicago 2015.
11 Calhoun, Joshua: The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England, Philadelphia 2020; Derrida, Jacques: Paper Machine, Redwood 2005; Kasten, Kathleen: Writing Life. Paper as Symbol and Commodity in the Letters of the Marquise de Sévigné, in: Dalhousie French Studies 107, 2015, p. 77–85. Online: <https://www.jstor.org/stable/26380181>, accessed: 08.07.2024; Senchyne, Jonathan: The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Amherst (MA) 2020.
12 Bajpai, Pratima: Recycling and Deinking of Recovered Paper, Amsterdam 2018; Baxter, Joan: The Mill: Fifty Years of Pulp and Protest, Lawrencetown (NS) 2017.
13 Bloom, Jonathan: Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World, New Haven 2001; Coggan, Philip: Paper Promises: Debt, Money, and the New World Order, Webstminster 2012. Constable, Marianne. The Paper Shredder: Trails of Law, in: Law Text Culture 23 (1), 2019, p. 276-293; Stamm, Michael: Dead Tree Media: Manufacturing the Newspaper in Twentieth-Century North America, Baltimore 2018.
14 Heesen, Anke te.: The Newspaper Clipping: A Modern Paper Object, Manchester 2014.
15 Ash, Jared: The Things Paper Carries, in: Art in Print 6 (5), 2017, p. 11-15. Online: <https://www.jstor.org/stable/26408721>, accessed: 08.07.2024.
16 Constable, Marianne: The Paper Shredder: Trails of Law, in: Law Text Culture 23 (1), 2019, p. 276-293; Vismann, Cornelia: Files: Law and Media Technology, Redwood 2008.
17 Hetherington, Kregg: Guerrilla Auditors: The Politics of Transparency in Neoliberal Paraguay, Durham 2011; Hull, Matthew S.: Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan, Berkeley 2012; Pinker, Annabel: Papering Over the Gaps. Documents, Infrastructure and Political Experimentation in Highland Peru, in: The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 33 (1), 2015, p. 97–112. Online: <https://www.jstor.org/stable/26370556>, accessed: 08.07.2024.
18 Bittel, Carla Jean; Leong, Elaine; Von Oertzen, Christine, eds.: Working with Paper: Gendered Practices in the History of Knowledge. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019; Craig, Heidi: Rags, Ragpickers, and Early Modern Papermaking, in: Literature Compass 16 (5), 2019, 16:e12523. Online : <https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12523>, accessed: 07.10.2024.
19 For a canonical text see, Gaskell, Philip: A New Introduction to Bibliography, Oxford 1972. For an alternative in French, see Varry, Dominique: La bibliographie matérielle. Renaissance d’une discipline, in: 50 ans d’histoire du livre, Villeurbanne 2014, Online: p. 96–109. Online: <https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pressesenssib.2685>, accessed: 08.07.2024. For digital resources, see Institut d’histoire du livre. Online: <http://ihl.enssib.fr/ressources-en-ligne>, accessed: 07.10.2024; Paper Through Time. Online: <http://paper.lib.uiowa.edu/>, accessed: 07.10.2024.
20 For a list of some of the international associations, see International Association of Paper Historians. Online: <https://www.paperhistory.org/National-org/>, accessed: 07.10.2024. These groups have produced many collections. For example, a working group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science lead to the publication of a book by the same name, see Bittel et al. (note 18). Online: <https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/>, accessed: 07.10.2024. For the Proceedings of a number of conferences dedicated to paper, see Centre de recherche Histoire culturelle et sociale de l’art (HiCSA) de l’Université Paris I. Online: <https://hicsa.pantheonsorbonne.fr/collection-conservation-restauration-biens-culturels>, accessed: 07.10.2024.
21 For a list of academic journals dedicated to paper, see IPH Paper History, Online: <https://www.paperhistory.org/Publications/>, accessed: 07.10.2024; Book & Paper Group. Online: <https://cool.culturalheritage.org/coolaic/sg/bpg/annual/>, accessed: 07.10.2024. For some special issues, see Pouvoirs du papier, in: Les Cahiers de médiologie, 1997. Online: <https://www.cairn.info/revue-les-cahiers-de-mediologie-1997-2.htm>, accessed: 07.10.2024; Paper Scarcity and its Impact on Print Culture/Historical Parallels with the Spectrum Scarcity Debate, in: Media History 21 (1), 2015. Online. For bibliographies, see for example AFHEPP. Online: <https://afhepp.org/spip.php?rubrique17>, accessed: 07.10.2024.
22 Sansom, Ian: Paper: An Elegy, Notting Hill 2013, p. 12.
23 The Paperology group first convened in 2020–2021 around a reading list compiled by the editors of this anthology. A second reading list was created by Christina Corfield, Rebecca Rouse, and Jenifer Monger for the group's meetings in 2021–2022. Finally, a third reading list was developed as part of a graduate seminar, “Pages Blanches,” at the Université de Montréal, co-taught by Juliette De Maeyer and Aleksandra Kaminska in 2022 and 2023. For an archive of these activities, see the Artefact Lab site. Online: <https://artefactlab.ca/paperology/>, accessed: 07.10.2024.
24 Héritier, Françoise: Innovation, invention, découverte. Conférence inaugurale, Les Actes du FIG Géographie de l’innovation, 2001.
25 Berliner, Jonathan: Written in the Birch Bark: The Linguistic-Material Worldmaking of Simon Pokagon, in: PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 125 (1), 2010, p. 73–91. Online: <https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2010.125.1.73>, accessed: 14.10.2024.
26 For an overview of the different kinds of fiber that can be used to make paper, see Fiber + Pulp: The Specimens (January 18 –June 10, 2022), Robert C. William Museum of Papermaking, Georgia Tech. Online: <https://paper.gatech.edu/fiber-pulp>, accessed: 07.10.2024.
27 For European perspectives on the work and labour of ragpickers, see Craig, Heidi: English Rag-Women and Early Modern Paper Production, in Wayne, Valerie, ed.: Women’s Labour and the History of the Book, London 2020, p. 29-46; Antoine Compagnon, Les Chiffonniers de Paris, Paris 2017.
28 Innis, Harold: The Bias of Communication, Toronto 1951. On the specific topic of paper, see Innis, Harold: The Coming of Paper, in: Intermédialités (17), 2011, p. 232-255. Online: <https://doi.org/10.7202/1005761ar>, accessed: 07.10.2024.
29 See, Olszowy-Schlanger, Judith: Les archives médiévales dans la genizah du Caire: registres des tribunaux rabbiniques et pratiques d’archivages reconstituées, in: Afriques 07, 2016. Online: <https://doi.org/10.4000/afriques.1885>, accessed: 07.10.2024.
30 Sellen, Abigail J.; Harper, Richard H. R.: The Myth of the Paperless Office, Cambridge 2003.
31 See, Kafka, Ben: The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork, Brooklyn 2012; Rule, John C.; Trotter, Ben S.: A World of Paper: Louis XIV, Colbert de Torcy, and the Rise of the Information State, Montréal 2014; Hess, Volker; Mendelsohn, Andrew: Case and Series: Medical Knowledge and Paper Technology, 1600–1900, in: History of Science 48 (3-4), 2010, p. 287-314. Online: <https://doi.org/10.1177/007327531004800302>, accessed: 07.10.2024; Ogborn, Miles: Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company, Chicago 2007.
32 On «El rey papelero» see, Wickberg Månsson, Adam: Paper Fever. A Media History of Early Modern Spain, in: Kallen, Anna (Hg.): Making Cultural History. New Perspectives on Western Heritage, Lund 2013, S. 119–129; Fernández-Gonzáles, Laura: Philip II of Spain and the Architecture of Empire, University Park 2021.
33 Dover, Paul: The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge 2021, p. 1, 5.
34 For additional examples see, Gruber Garvey, Ellen: Scissorizing and Scrapbooks. Nineteenth Century Reading, Remaking and Recirculating, in: Gitelman, Lisa; Pingree, Geoffrey B. (Hg.): New media, 1740-1915, Cambridge (MA) 2003, p. 207-227; Gitelman, Lisa; Pingree, Goeffrey B., eds. MIT Press, 2003; Pelling, Madeleine: Crafting Friendship. Mary Delany’s Album and Queen Charlotte’s Pocketbook, in: Journal18: a journal of eighteenth-century art and culture, 2018. Online: <https://www.journal18.org/2909>, accessed: 08.07.2024; Kowalchuk, Kristine: Preserving on Paper: Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen's Receipt Books, Toronto 2017; Park, Julie: Line Making as Life Writing: Graphic Literacy and Design in Eighteenth-Century Commonplace Books, in: Eighteenth-Century Life 48 (1), 2024, p.72-91. Online: <https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-10951326>, accessed: 07.10.2024; Eddy, Matthew Daniel: Media and the Mind: Art, Science, and Notebooks as Paper Machines, 1700–1830, Chicago 2023.
35 See, Head, Randolph C.: Making Archives in Early Modern Europe: Proof, Information, and Political Record-Keeping, 1400–1700, Cambridge 2019.
36 See, Peters, Kate; Walsham, Alexandra; Corens, Liesbeth: Archives and Information in the Early Modern World, 2018. Online: <https://doi.org/10.5871/bacad/9780197266250.001.0001>, accessed: 07.10.2024; Charmantier, Isabelle; Müller-Wille, Staffan: Carl Linnaeus’s Botanical Paper Slips (1767–1773), in: Intellectual History Review, 2014, p. 215-238. Online: <https://doi.org/10.1080/17496977.2014.914643>, accessed: 07.10.2024.
37 Krajewski, Markus: Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548–1929, Cambridge (MA) 2011; Blair, Ann M.: Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age, New Haven 2011; Becker, Peter & Clark, William: Little Tools of Knowledge: Historical Essays on Academic and Bureaucratic Practices, Ann Arbour 2001; Jardine, Boris: State of the Field: Paper Tools, in: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 64 (A), 2017, p. 53–63. Online: <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2017.07.004>, accessed: 07.10.2024; Barton, Roman Alexander, Böckling, Julia, Link, Sarah; Rüggemeier, Anne: Forms of List-Making: Epistemic, Literary and Visual Enumeration, New York 2022. Online: <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76970-3_1>, accessed: 07.10.2024.
38 Bower, Peter: Turner’s Papers: A Study of the Manufacture, Selection and Use of His Drawing Papers 1787–1820. London 1991.
39 On the extraordinary possibilities of paper folding see the work of artist and “paper engineer” Online: <https://kellianderson.com>, accessed: 07.10.2024; see also the research-creation work of Rebecca Rouse on her site, <http://www.rebeccarouse.com/movable-books--paper.html>, accessed: 07.10.2024.
40 Following from the work of sociologist Richard Sennett and anthropologist Tim Ingold, we can therefore think of paper in terms of the logic of the work of the hand and of making. See, Sennett, Richard: The Craftsman, New Haven 2008; Ingold, Tim: Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, Abingdon-on-Thames 2013.
41 We can think of practices halfway between games and mathematics, such as geometric folding exercises, a form of entertainment encouraged by certain books of the 17th and 18th centuries. See Friedman, Michael; Rougetet, Lisa: Folding in Recreational Mathematics during the 17th–18th Centuries: Between Geometry and Entertainment, in: Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum 5 (2), 2017, p. 5-34. Online: <https://doi.org/10.11590/abhps.2017.2.01>, accessed: 08.07.2024.
42 On this topic, see Calhoun, Joshua: This Book, as Long Lived as the Elements: Climate Control, Biodeterioration and the Poetics of Decay, in: The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England, Philadelphia 2020, p. 126–154.
43 See, Solberg, Emma Maggie: Human and Insect Bookworms, in: Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 11, 2020, p.12-22. Online: <https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00162-z>, accessed: 07.10.2024; Murphy, Brian Micheal: We the Dead: Preserving Data at the End of the World, Chapel Hill 2022; Monger, Jenifer; Gobert, Tammy: The Perfect Storm: Weathering a Mold Bloom and Preparing for Disasters. Archival Outlook, 2020. Online: <https://bluetoad.com/article/The+Perfect+Storm%3A+Weathering+a+Mold+Bloom+and+Preparing+for+Disasters/3725790/667849/article.html>, accessed: 07.10.2024.
44 See, Rosenberg, Joseph Elkanah: Paper Bombs: The Blitz and the Aesthetics of Salvage, in: Modernism/Modernity 26 (3), 2019, p. 455-481. Online: <https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2019.0038>, accessed: 07.10.2024; Price, Leah: The Book as Waste: Henry Mayhew and the Fall of Paper Recycling, in: How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, Princeton 2012, p. 219–257; Butterworth, Emily: Apothecaries’ Cornets: Books as Waste Paper in the Renaissance, in: Modern Language Notes 133 (4), 2018, p. 891–913. Online: <https://www.jstor.org/stable/26800258>, accessed: 07.10.2024.
45 See, the Centre for Ephemera Studies and Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, The University of Reading: Printed Ephemera from the Collection at the University of Reading, 2017. Online: <https://a-z-ephemera.org/az_duos/a/>, accessed: 07.10.2024. For specialized journals, see The Ephemera Journal. Online: <https://www.ephemerasociety.org/ephemera-journal/>, accessed: 07.10.2024; Le Vieux Papier. Online: <https://www.levieuxpapier-asso.org/>. For a recent perspective on the study of ephemera, see, Garner, Anne: State of the Discipline: Throwaway History: Towards a Historiography of Ephemera, in: Book History 24 (1), 2021, p. 244–263. Online: <https://doi.org/10.1353/bh.2021.0008>, accessed: 07.10.2024. Collections of ephemera are available in some archives, which are increasingly making them available in digitized versions, such as the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Online: <https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/collections-and-resources/special-collections/catalogues/johnson>, accessed: 07.10.2024.
Creating Paper
Texts
La galaxie Tsaï-Loun
François Dupuigrenet-Desroussilles:
La galaxie Tsaï-Loun, in: Les cahiers de médiologie 4 (2), Paris 1997, S. 65–83.
Published in Cahiers de la médiologie, François Dupuigrenet-Desroussilles’ article easily achieves in a few pages what entire works could never manage: a history of paper from the Tch'ou dynasty to the 20th century. This specialist in the history of the Italian book usefully outlines the sites of emergence, modes of production, circulation networks, and uses of paper and books through the ages and across cultures. The article begins and ends with the question: are we, in the digital age, in the "conclusive phase" of paper's centuries-long life cycle?
Papermaking. The Historical Diffusion of an Ancient Technique
Jonathan M. Bloom:
Papermaking. The Historical Diffusion of an Ancient Technique, in: Jöns, Heike; Meusburger, Peter; Heffernan, Michael (Hg.): Mobilities of Knowledge, Cham 2017 (Knowledge and Space), S. 51–66.
In this article, art historian Jonathan M. Bloom describes, in accessible language, the spread of papermaking between 600 and 1500. It's a journey that begins in China, crosses Eurasia and the Mediterranean region, and then arrives in Europe. As a specialist in Islamic art, the author highlights the contribution of the Arab world to papermaking and its worldwide circulation. Spanning centuries, cultures, and geographies, the article offers a fairly comprehensive overview of all the factors involved in paper production, including its relationship with other inscription materials such as papyrus or parchment, the resources and materials it required (plant fibers or rags, but also the energy sources needed to run paper mills), and the variations in manufacturing processes that run through its rich history.
La question préalable . L’apparition du papier en Europe
Lucien Paul Victor Febvre, Henri Jean Martin:
La question préalable . L’apparition du papier en Europe, in: Febvre, Lucien Paul Victor; Martin, Henri Jean: L’apparition du livre, Paris 1958, S. 64–88.
In their classic 1958 book, L'apparition du livre, French historians Lucien Febvre and Henri Jean Martin begin with what they see as the "prerequisite" for the rise of the typographic industry and the printed book in Europe: paper. In this first chapter, they take a closer look at the development of papermaking in Europe. The process, invented in China and having crossed the Arab world, arrived in Europe in the 12th century. Starting with the first papermaking centers in Italy (including the well-known Fabriano mill), Febvre and Martin describe the expansion of paper production between the 12th and 18th centuries, outlining the resources it required: water, rags, but also ragpickers, trade networks, and all the key actors in the political economy of paper and books.
Surface Reading Paper as Feminist Bibliography
Georgina Wilson:
Surface Reading Paper as Feminist Bibliography, in: Criticism 64 (3), 05.06.2023.
Georgina Wilson (St Michael’s College, Cambridge University) provides an excellent example of the contribution that bibliographic studies—“the earliest form of materially attentive textual studies” (p. 71)—makes to the study of paper. Here, Wilson specifically argues for the importance of expanding the study of literary forms to include not just the text written on the page but also the making of the page, namely the labour to produce the paper itself. Through the case of Ben Jonson’s 1605 folio Sejanus His Fall and the story behind its watermarks, she deftly draws our attention to the conditions of the papermakers and women ragpickers who provided the primary material on which the text is written. In doing so, she ultimately makes an argument for surface reading as a form of critical feminist bibliography.
Why Is Writing Paper Blue?
Dena Goodman:
Why Is Writing Paper Blue? Colour and Fashion in Eighteenth Century Writing Paper, in: Corcy, Marie-Sophie; Douyère-Demeulenaere, Christiane; Hilaire-Pérez, Liliane (Hg.): Les archives de l’invention : Écrits, objets et images de l’activité inventive, Toulouse 2006 (Méridiennes), S. 537–546.
Dena Goodman, Professor of History at the University of Michigan, traces the emergence of blue-colored writing paper in the 18th century and the wider context of the trade war between France and the Netherlands in paper production. While French producers judged a paper by its degree of whiteness, the Dutch revolutionized the papermaking industry by producing paper of exceptional quality. Dutch production methods gave the paper a bluish tinge that soon became its hallmark. This fascinating episode in the history of paper shows how a production-related effect can lead to the establishment of a cultural standard, and how much the aesthetic qualities of paper also reflect cultural values.
Rags Make Paper, Paper Makes Money
Jonathan Senchyne:
Rags Make Paper, Paper Makes Money. Material Texts and Metaphors of Capital, in: Technology and Culture 58 (2), 2017, S. 545–555.
It could be argued that few paper items are as mysterious as paper money, a paper that comes to have a particular value in its use as currency. Jonathan Senchyne (University of Wisconsin-Madison) works from a particular feature of early paper money in this article, namely that it was produced, like all paper of the time, with rags. Bringing together history of technology, print culture, literary studies, and book history, he provides a reading of two 19th century short stories that, by placing the materiality of paper at their heart, reveal the ways that paper can offer new ways to understand capitalism. Together Senchyne argue, these stories present two sides of paper as a technology of capitalism, one that hides and the other that reveals something about the production of value.
Mediating the Tree
Aleksandra Kaminska, Rafico Ruiz:
Mediating the Tree. Infrastructures of Pulp and Paper Modernity in The Bowater Papers, in: Canadian Journal of Communication 46 (2), 24.04.2021, S. 315–343.
This article provides a close reading of The Bowater Papers, the in-house publication of the Bowater Paper Corporation, one of the largest Canadian pulp mills of the 1950s. Not so much a sales catalogue as a promotional vehicle for the industry, The Bowater Papers include a smorgasbord of paper-centric articles—historical trivia, articles on manufacturing, arts and crafts, potential applications, to name just a few—all of it presented lavishly with full-colour illustrations, inserts, or other features. Aiming to restore the place of paper in media studies (as a resource, technology, and infrastructure), and unearthing along the way the notion of xylomedia as a catchall to capture a media environment centered on wood, the authors draw out the problematic side of a paper modernity: the devastating environmental impact of pulp and paper mills and carbon-intensive infrastructures of paper circulation.
What We Can Learn From Books in the Digital Age
Michael Stamm:
What We Can Learn From Books in the Digital Age, in: Studies in Communication Sciences 23 (3), 09.12.2023, S. 311–320.
Michael Stamm, professor at Michigan State University, introduces in this text an intriguing hypothesis for the history of technology and media: what if too much emphasis had been placed on ruptures between different media rather than on innovations within a single media form? To answer this research question, Stamm looks back at certain innovations in book production, particularly in response to the rise of the environmental movement in the second half of the 20th century. He analyzes the commercial and ethical logics of books that address ecological issues while also having been made using sustainable production methods (new, more environmentally-friendly materials, recycling practices and the use of ecological inks). In doing so he shows the persistence of the book in the digital age and at a time of heightened environmental awareness.
Supplements
The Making of Japanese Handmade Paper
Ayun Halliday:
The Making of Japanese Handmade Paper. A Short Film Documents an 800-Year-Old Tradition, 5:40 min, Vimeo, 02.05.2016.
A short video on the production of washi paper in Japan’s oldest paper-making town, Kurotani, where the same method has been used for over 800 years.
Les arts et les industries du papier en France
Marius Vachon:
Les arts et les industries du papier en France, 1871-1894, Paris 1894.
A late 19th-century book on paper and its industries that focuses on how things were made. Includes chapters on papermaking, reproduction processes for paper (e.g., printing, engraving), and paper-based artifacts (e.g., books, newspapers, posters, wallpaper). Illustrated throughout with an emphasis on photographs of the factories and workshops where each element was produced, the book offers a historical look inside the labour of paper.
La fabrication du papier
Gil LaRoche:
La fabrication du papier, 15 min, 1954.
This National Film Board of Canada short film dates from 1954, when the paper industry was at its peak. It shows the processes involved in making newsprint from wood, with a visit to a Bowater paper mill in Corner Brook, Newfoundland. The images evoke the full industrial scope of papermaking and the impressive machinery it requires. For educational purposes, the reporter also demonstrates the papermaking process by making pulp in a kitchen, using household accessories.
Moving Paper
Texts
The Paper Trade in Early Modern Europe: An Introduction
Daniel Bellingradt:
The Paper Trade in Early Modern Europe: An Introduction, in: The Paper Trade in Early Modern Europe. Practices, Materials, Networks, 2021, S. 1–27.
This introductory chapter to The Paper Trade in Early Modern Europe carefully highlights the interdisciplinary nature of historiographical research on paper. Daniel Bellingradt, professor at the Universität Augsburg and co-editor of the book, highlights the importance of paper in early modern Europe, stating that "paper was one of the main artifacts of the period, a mass product that came in many formats and qualities for a variety of usages" (p. 3). Bellingradt then offers an overview of the secondary literature in the history of communication, the history of the book, the history of paper, and economic history, presenting the contributions of these fields to understanding paper circulation and trade. Finally, the author points out that, despite its importance, little research has been done on paper trade history, something that the edited collection aims to redress through the lenses of both paper trade practices and paper trade materials.
Les archives manuscrites avouent !
Céline Gendron:
Les archives manuscrites avouent ! Papier d’écriture en Nouvelle-France au XVIIe siècle . Usages, usagers et catégories de documents, in: Archives 48 (1), 2019, S. 55–87.
Céline Gendron's article, which stems from her dissertation completed at the Université de Montréal, relies on the consultation and analysis of rich archival documents that shed light on the provenance and use of paper in 17th-century New France. Paper, in a variety of forms, becomes witness to the administrative activities of religious and political communities. This text offers an original account of the French presence in North America, revisiting it through the prism of paper, an essential material vector for maintaining a diversity of relations.
Trade Cards in 18th-Century Consumer Culture
Philippa Hubbard:
Trade Cards in 18th-Century Consumer Culture: Circulation, and Exchange in Commercial and Collecting Spaces, in: Material Culture Review, 01.01.2012.
The theme of paper circulation is at the heart of this article, which documents the phenomenon of trade cards in France, Great Britain, and the United States in the 18th century. Long neglected by scholars, 18th-century trade maps bear witness to the emergence of modern consumer culture. Phillippa Hubbard approaches trade maps from a material culture perspective, analyzing the roles, functions, and sensory experiences of trade maps in their socio-historical context. Through rigorous analytical work, she demonstrates the multitude of networks - economic, interpersonal, domestic and international — that are traversed by commercial trade cards.
Dead Letter Reckoning
Hester Blum:
Dead Letter Reckoning, in: Blum, Hester: The News at the Ends of the Earth. The Print Culture of Polar Exploration, 2019, S. 177–208.
News at the Ends of the Earth is a book written by English professor Hester Blum (Pennsylvania State University). The book offers reflection on what she calls ecomedias, the ephemera produced and used by explorers on their Arctic expeditions in the 19th century. Chapter 4, Dead Letter Reckoning, analyzes in particular the missives, written on paper, left in various places (in cairns or bottles) to be read in the future. Blum offers a rich analytical treatment of a variety of documents whose circulation, in time and space, was dependent on a precarious environment.
Supplements
Gossamer Network
Cameron Blevins, Yan Wu, Yan, Steven Braun:
Gossamer Network. A Companion Website to Cameron Blevins, Paper Trails. The US Post and the Making of the American West (Oxford University Press, 2021), 2021.
"The Gossamer Network" is a website that complements historian Cameron Blevins' book Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West. A digital humanities project, the site presents an interactive map of the Gossamer Network, the name given to a network of American postal services overseen by the Federal Government in the second half of the 19th century. The website’s architecture, which can be navigated by selecting one of the eight chapters, relies on a digital map of the western regions of the USA, overlaid with information on the distribution of post offices in this territory over several historical periods. Postal offices are then cross-referenced with other types of data, including the establishment of other U.S. government offices and information about native lands. The website seeks to make visible the taking of territory in the United States from the hands of native communities, notably through the inauguration of postal services and the circulation of paper documents.
Trees to Tribunes
Wilding Picture Productions, Inc. Chicago:
Trees to Tribunes, 19:17 min, 1937.
Trees to Tribune is a short industrial film produced by the Chicago Tribune in 1937. The twenty-minute black-and-white film presents the various stages of paper production, beginning with the company's tree supply, a two-million-hectare territory north of the St. Lawrence River in the Canadian province of Quebec. Embodying the perspective of natural resource exploitation typical of the period, the film asserts “the perpetual supply” of trees that make up this territory. It goes on to document the work and daily life of the lumberjacks, the transportation of wood by horse, log drive, and boat, and the infrastructure required for pulp production. The film bears witness to the epistemological discourses on technical rationality, the domination of nature, and the optimization of production processes found in the Western industrial world of the time.
Prize Papers Materiality: Practices
Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen:
Prize Papers Materiality: Practices, Göttingen, ongoing.
The Prize Papers Project explores the Prize Papers, a staggering collection of thousands of artifacts found aboard 35,000 captured ships dating from the mid 17th through to the early 19th century. Researchers from the Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg, Germany, and at The National Archives in the United Kingdom are seeking to trace how these objects and documents were handled and preserved, showcasing their work in a digital portal. The link we suggest as a starting point here is to a section on the materiality of paper documents. It shows how the team carried out their research as well as their discoveries into the paper practices and forms of the times, including the folding techniques of letter-locking for security purposes and the bundling or binding of administrative papers.
Organizing (with) Paper
Texts
Administration I: The State, the Fact, and Double-Entry Bookkeeping
Liam Cole Young:
Administration I: The State, the Fact, and Double-Entry Bookkeeping, in: List Cultures, Amsterdam 2017, S. 67–84.
In this chapter from his book List Cultures, Liam Cole Young (Carleton University) makes a convincing argument about the essential role that lists have had in establishing administrative protocols that ultimately serve to control individuals. He develops a genealogy of the list as a cultural technique of “logistical modernity,” a historical moment that, Young argues, privileges processes of compression, calculation, and circulation. The discussion is structured around three axes—the modern state, the fact, and double-entry bookkeeping—through which Young traces the rise of (paper) administrative tools and how these took shape in organized paperwork formats.
Granular Certainty, the Vertical Filing Cabinet, and the Transformation of Files
Craig Robertson:
Granular Certainty, the Vertical Filing Cabinet, and the Transformation of Files, in: Administory 4 (1), 01.12.2019, S. 71–86.
Media scholar Craig Robertson’s work on filing is an example of research that looks at the organizational tools and furnishings we have developed to organize papers, information, and knowledge. In this article he turns to that quintessential object of office life, the vertical filing cabinet, and shows how it is made up of multiple paper storage technologies: the tabbed manila folder, the index, charge (or substitution) cards. The goal of this system is to facilitate retrieval through a logic the author calls “granular certainty”, an optimal overlap between efficiency and information that is made possible through standardization and classification. This structure also contributes to the history of information by facilitating the atomization of knowledge into extractable, moveable, and decontextualized units.
Collecting Knowledge for the Family
Elaine Leong:
Collecting Knowledge for the Family: Recipes, Gender and Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern English Household, in: Centaurus 55, 2013, S. 81–103.
In an example of paper organizing that looks outside of bureaucracy and officialdom, Elaine Leong takes us into the homes of the 17th century. Here, in the introduction to her book Recipes and Everyday Knowledge, we get an overview of her research on the many ways that knowledge about the natural world was produced and shared in the home. This practice of “household science” incorporated everything from medicine to materials to household management, and became inscribed as “recipe knowledge”: “short instructions encoding know-how about making all sorts of things” (p. 4).
Couper, coller dans les manuscrits de travail du XVIIIe au XXe siècle
Claire Bustarret:
Couper, coller dans les manuscrits de travail du XVIIIe au XXe siècle, in: Michel, Albin (Hg.): Lieux de savoir 2: Les mains de l’intellect, 2011, S. 353–375.
In this study of analog cut-and-paste practices in the notebooks and manuscripts of writers from the 18th to the 20th centuries, Claire Bustarret questions whether something has been lost with the dematerialized operations allowed by computers. Where paper was once cut and glued and written upon and added to, now the workings of intellectual activity are neatly erased with no trace to help follow the genealogy of a text or the movement of ideas. Using this pre-digital context, the article asks how we can understand the gestures of cutting-out and collaging, particularly in relation to copying. Bustarret turns to the working method of famous French authors—Montesquieu, Buffon, Proust, Barthes, among others. Ultimately, she argues that collage and montage are essential to writing itself.
Passeport pour le Ciel
Julien Bonhomme:
Passeport pour le Ciel. Prophétisme et bureaucratie au Congo (1921-1960), in: Gradhiva. Revue d’anthropologie et d’histoire des arts (32), 24.03.2021, S. 124–143.
Julien Bonhomme takes a close look at some paper-based realities in what is an often overlooked site in the study of paper, the heart of Africa. Focused on the colonial context of the Congo in the first half of the 20th century when it was under Belgian rule, the article argues that writing was used to legitimate religious power (starting with the Bible), but also to produce the state’s authority through the bureaucratic administration of documents. At the heart of the story are “passports for the sky,” documents devised by the anti-colonialist Mission des Noirs religious groups and prophets that had emerged in the Congo starting with Simon Kimbangu in 1921. These passports—used to attest membership in a religious group or free passage to heaven—are one example of the institutionalisation of prophetism and of the bureaucratic performance of the church’s authority. As with other religious documents, they are, Bonhomme shows, conceived to symbolically and materially emulate state documents.
Supplements
Paperwork Explosion
The Jim Henson Company:
Paperwork Explosion, 4:58, 1967.
This 1967 ad by Jim Henson (creator of the Muppets) for IBM takes a look at paperwork that is both existential and... explosive.
Mapping Knowledge
Wouter van Acker:
Mapping Knowledge. The Visualizations of Paul Otlet, Archives of the Mundaneum by the Ghent University Library, 2011.
A digital exhibition of Belgian Paul Otlet’s (1868-1944) Mundaneum, an ambitious encyclopedic project to map the world of knowledge. The exhibition includes images produced by Otlet, and offer his visual synthesis within the constant constraint of the paper page
Manipulating Paper
Texts
Traditional Values and Modern Meanings in the Paper Offering Industry of Hong Kong
Janet Lee Scott:
Traditional Values and Modern Meanings in the Paper Offering Industry of Hong Kong, in: Evans, Grant; Tam, Maria (Hg.): Hong Kong. The Anthropology of a Chinese Metropolis, Honululu 1997.
This chapter by Janet Lee Scott is part of a book on Hong Kong’s Chinese heritage. The author takes us into the ongoing practices of paper burning as a ritualistic way to mourn the deceased. These paper offerings take the shape of consumer products such as cars, houses, TVs, even the newest forms of technology. In burning these paper forms, as the belief goes, the goods are being given to the dead, assuring their comfort in the afterlife. Lee Scott offers a few reasons to explain the enduring popularity of this practice, which include a desire to maintain Chinese tradition and craft knowledge, as well as a social expectation of consumerism that carries on in death. But, the most important reasons for this activity, she argues, are a deeply-rooted belief in caring for one’s ancestors. As the living diligently burn paper offerings as a form of care, they also hope to receive some luck in return.
Touching Sentiment
Christina Michelon:
Touching Sentiment. The Tactility of Nineteenth-Century Valentines, in: The Journal of Early American Life 16 (2), 2016.
In this richly illustrated text, art historian Christina Michelon examines the ephemeral art of Valentine's Day cards. Focusing on cards produced in the United States between 1840 and 1890, the author reveals the tensions at the heart of their production, between standardization and intimacy, industrial manufacturing processes and allusions to handmade art. Beyond a purely textual or visual history, the article adopts a perspective focused on material meanings. It shows that it is the tactile character of these cards that matters, and their materiality that makes them touching, rather than the messages they carry as inscriptions.
Potent Papers
Patricia Crain:
Potent Papers, in: Commonplace 9 (1), 2008.
The technology of the ballot paper has a fascinating history in which several fundamental epistemic virtues of contemporary political systems, such as authenticity, authority and legitimacy, come into play. In this short article, Patricia Crain, professor at New York University, looks back at the history of the ballot in the United States in the 19th century. Richly illustrated, this article takes an analytical look at several ballot formats, showing the interrelationships between the symbolic value of ballots and their materiality. A bibliographical list at the end of the article provides readers with further research on the history of the ballot, voting technologies, and election processes more generally.
Pinning and Punching
Craig Robertson, Deidre Lynch:
Pinning and Punching. A Provisional History of Holes, Paper, and Books, in: Inscription:The Journal of Material Text – Theory, Practice, History, 19.10.2021.
The starting intuition of Pinning and Punching: A Provisional History of Holes, Paper, and Books is that the production of holes in paper, whether by punching or pinning, not only alters our relationship with paper but also allows us to question the spatial limits of the book, whose fixity is, literally and metaphorically, opened up by holes. The two authors of this article, Craig Robertson and Deidre Lynch, come from distinct disciplines — communication studies and English literature - and this interdisciplinarity is put to use in a narrative that takes us from the first copy of Aurora Leigh's 1857 edition, to patents for the first perforating machines, to book-binding techniques.
De la page blanche à la sculpture
Alexandre Melay, Valérie Morisson:
De la page blanche à la sculpture, les multiples formes de l’objet-livre - Entretien, in: Interfaces. Image Texte Language (45), 12.07.2021.
In this interview published in the journal Interface, dedicated to studies on intermediality, visual artist and researcher Alexandre Melay delves into the different variations of the book-object that run through his work. "Neither quite books, nor quite objects", these works seek to question the form of the book. Whether "book-building" or "book-model", Melay's works offer a variety of detours, games, and transgressions around the expected form of the codex (in which the text is not necessarily what matters most), and question the boundaries of the book. Through numerous examples, the interview sketches out a version of the book as a sensitive object that can be touched and manipulated, rather than as a medium of inscription.
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Paper Worlds
Vanessa Warne, Jessie Krahnn and Anne Hung:
Paper Worlds (S1E6), Podcast Crafting Communities, Bd. 6, 52 min., 2021.
Victorian Samplings is a podcast series created and hosted by Professors Andrea Korda, Mary Elizabeth Leighton, and Vanessa Warne. Supported in part by several Canadian universities and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the series is one of several contributions of the team towards the production of educational resources on nineteenth-century material cultures. Episode 6 of season 1, entitled Paper Worlds, invites guests to look back at some of the uses of paper in the Victorian era, from the "little books" used by Charlotte Brontë in the 1830s, to the collection of rags by the working classes, the use and production of wallpaper to decorate children's rooms, and the various material devices and social functions of valentines.
The Perfect Cut
Aleksandra Kaminska, Juliette De Maeyer:
The Perfect Cut. Talking with Myriam Dion, in: Inscription. The Journal of Material Text – Theory, Practice, History 2, 19.10.2021.
This interview with Montreal artist Myriam Dion was published in the interdisciplinary journal Inscription — The journal of material texts: theory, practice, history, which devoted its 2021 issue to the theme of holes. Dion has made a name for herself with her paper-cut works, in which she plays with material and pattern with remarkable detail and precision, sublimating sometimes quite innocuous papers such as newspaper pages. In the interview, she discusses her fascination with patterns — particularly in the traditions of textile arts, weaving and tapestry — the repetitive, obsessive nature of her work, and her incessant play with the physical qualities of the paper she perforates, cuts, and punches. It is through the surface of paper that Dion creates, in a patiently planned and executed relationship between form and content.
Slicing the Page
Adam Smyth:
Slicing the Page. Christophe Leutbrewer and Raymond Queneau, TEXT!, 23.04.2022.
In this short entry from his blog Text!, historian of the book (and a founder of Inscriptions journal) Adam Smyth compares two books designed with numerous horizontal slices on each page. The first is a 1658 Catholic confession book. Consisting of pages and pages of possible sins printed in the form of a list, the book was used to remind its owner of what they had to bring up during their next confession. Ingeniously, since the way to mark a sin was to fold it horizontally back from the margin inward, the book’s design allowed it to be reused: a fold could be straightened once the sin was absolved, ready to be folded again as needed. The second is the more recent A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, a book published by Raymond Queneau in 1961. In this interactive book, a reader chooses how to combine the pre-cut strips of text, choosing one of ten strips for each of the 14 lines on the page. The result is one among a possible 100,000,000,000,000 poetic variations.
Enduring Paper
Texts
Diverse Shapes
Simon Werrett:
Diverse Shapes. Used Goods as Material Resources in Early Modern Sciences, in: Isis 114 (2), 2023, S. 407–412.
This text focuses on the multiple reuses of paper in the early modern period. Rather than seeing paper production as the production of a raw material (with its extractivist economic logics), historian of science Simon Werrett encourages us to think of paper as an example of the logic of "oeconomy", i.e. the careful and measured use of resources, including their recycling and reuse. The diversity of ways in which paper (itself a product of rag recycling) is reused, in both the domestic and scholarly spheres, makes it an open-ended material, carrying a range of indeterminate uses and meanings.
Analogue Privacy
Sarah Blacker:
Analogue Privacy: The Paper Shredder as a Technology for Knowledge Destruction, in: Bauer, Susanne; Schlünder, Martina; Rentetzi, Maria (Hg.): Boxes: A Field Guide, Manchester 2020.
This chapter from the book "Boxes: a field guide" is an object lesson on the paper shredder. The book presents all kinds of boxes in a natural history-inspired format: the chapter therefore presents the taxonomy, habitat, and identification features of this "fragmentation machine" that is the paper shredder. Through the history of the two inventors (in the USA and Germany) of the shredder, the text also sketches a history of paper as a document, and of its qualities that make it a medium of knowledge — whose circulation, sometimes considered dangerous, requires the implementation of means of destruction. Through projects such as Germany's 'Stasi-Schnipselmaschine' initiative to reconstitute 16,250 bags of fragments from documents destroyed by the Stasi, the text ultimately questions the tension between definitive and incomplete destruction.
La survie improbable
Malcolm Walsby:
La survie improbable : les livres sauvés par leur matérialité, in: La Revue de la BNU (21), 01.05.2020, S. 60–69.
In this article, book historian Malcolm Walsby explores a fascinating paradox: it is because they were consciously destroyed that some books have reached us. In this text, richly endowed with examples from the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, he shows how certain books and manuscripts were literally cut to pieces and reused in other books: precious sheets of paper or parchment could be used to reinforce boards or serve as cover material — the usefulness of their material qualities thus outweighed that of their content. The text also reveals the painstaking work of researchers, who pull out the threads of clues hidden in the bindings, covers and other nooks and crannies of books, to reconstruct the history of other books from these tiny fragments.
Le papier permanent
Lucie Favier:
Le papier permanent, in: La Gazette des archives 155 (1), 1991, S. 268–274.
Published in a special issue of the Gazette des archives on the preservation and restoration of paper documents, this article by Lucie Favier, General Secretary of the Archives nationales (France), reports on the efforts of various national and international standardization bodies to codify the characteristics of a "permanent paper" standard, i.e. a paper whose material qualities enable it to resist the bio-deterioration process and ensure its conservation over a prolonged period. The text reports on the standards development process carried out in the late 1980s within international bodies such as the ISO and other national and supra-national bodies, where scientific and industrial logics and those of paper users had to come to an agreement.
Les éphémères, un continent à explorer
Olivier Belin, Florence Ferran:
Les éphémères, un continent à explorer, in: Colloque Fabula: Les éphémères, un patrimoine à construire, 2015.
In this article published in Proceedings reporting on the activities of the research collective "PatrimEph - The Patrimonialization of Ephemera" (2013-2016), Olivier Belin and Florence Ferran offer an overview of the intellectual, practical, and patrimonial challenges posed by the category of "ephemera", those famously heterogeneous paper objects. The text discusses the British conception of ephemera in contrast to the French tradition (“vieux papiers”), and shows how interest in these objects has been shaped by different disciplines, but also under the impetus of amateur collectors and certain heritage institutions. Noting significant definitional and terminological challenges, the text proposes a "positive" definition of ephemera, and brings together the epistemological questions they pose for different disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.
Supplements
Panic at the Library
Brian Michael Murphy:
Panic at the Library. The Sinister History of Fumigating “Foreign” Books, Lapham’s Quarterly, 23.08.2022.
In this excerpt from his book We the Dead: Preserving Data at the End of the World, media archaeologist and essayist Brian Michael Murphy (Bennington College, Vermont) takes as his starting point a bookworm infestation at the Huntington Library in 1928, and the dismay of librarian Thomas Marion Liams at the damage the pests were doing to his collections: the insects were devouring paper, but also binding, glue and covers. The article places this story in the context of the hygienic concerns of the early 20th century: public libraries were deploying a whole range of means to ensure new standards of "purity": disinfection, quarantine of books and people, chemical fumigation... To protect his books from insects, Liams installs gas chambers and fumigation tanks (including experiments with the deadly Zyklon B) to rid books of pests.
Fingerprints and Pulp
Maureen Flint:
Fingerprints and Pulp. Nomadic Ethics in Research Practice, Maureen Flint, 2020.
For her work "Fingerprints and Pulp", researcher and artist Maureen Flint (University of Georgia) made recycled paper from her doctoral thesis. Her research-creation process involves destroying the paper (cutting out, soaking, blending and pulping the pages of her thesis) to create a new form, raising questions about representation and ethics in her qualitative research process. In the malleability of paper pulp, its holes, flaws and non-linearity, she also questions her responsibility to the participants who have shared the experiences and stories that populate her work.