History through the paper trail

PAPER
Paging Through History
Mark Kurlansky
W W Norton & Company
389 pages; $27.95

Paper holds the world together. It wipes our foreheads, cleans up spills, bags groceries and disposes of waste products. It floods into our mailboxes at home and across our desks at work. And it's not going away anytime soon. From the late 1970s, futurologists predicted that we would soon work in paperless offices. Though paper use in offices is decreasing, the average American in white or pink collar still generates two pounds of paper and paper products a day. That in turn is only part of around 700 pounds of paper the average American uses in a year.

Mark Kurlansky has written histories of cod and salt. Now he has turned to another apparently insignificant, indispensable subject. More than 2,000 years ago, the Chinese realised that plant fibres, now known as cellulose, could be beaten, mixed with water and then left on a screen to drain until a sheet - a sheet of paper - remains. This modest, practical insight changed the world. Millennia before anyone knew what cellulose was, paper makers separated it from wood and silk, cotton and seaweed, and devised a writing material that is still cheaper and more adaptable than any other.

The history of paper is a history of cultural transmission, and Mr Kurlansky tells it vividly in this compact book. He follows paper across borders and oceans - to Japan and Korea, on the one hand, and into Central Asia and what would become the Islamic world on the other - and watches it change. In Andalusia, Roman mills, originally used for making olive oil, ground cellulose exceedingly fine, helping make thin, smooth paper. In Fabriano in the Italian Marche, wire moulds produced paper with handsome surface patterns and distinctive water marks.

Paper mills were not good neighbours. They were noisy, processed vast piles of dirty rags, collected by ragpickers, and stank of ammonia, often derived from human urine, which was used to break down the rags' fibres. Nonetheless, paper was needed, and mills spread. Inexpensive paper made possible the creation of enormous libraries, which in turn underpinned the intellectual flowering of the Muslim Middle Ages and the rise of printing in both Asia and Europe.

Experimentation never stopped. The 18th century saw the creation of wove paper: a smooth paper, without the ribbed pattern created by traditional wire moulds, which artists like Turner used to create dramatic new effects. In the 19th century, the steam engine turned paper mills into factories that made paper from wood pulp. Even in the digital age, Mr Kurlansky shows, paper finds new uses and serves old ones: If print newspapers are in decline, print books look healthy, especially as new technologies produce them more quickly and cheaply.

To put the history of paper in context means knowing its rivals, the other traditional writing materials and the cultures that used them. Mr Kurlansky briskly surveys everything from Chinese oracle bones, cuneiform tablets and Egyptian papyrus to Mexican amate - bark-based writing material, not true paper, on which Aztecs wrote glyphs, though they may also have made real paper from agave.

Mr Kurlansky loves explaining technologies, but he is no '90s-style techno­determinist. He cautions against believing in the "technological fallacy." Human needs and abilities determine the success and failure of new technologies. Paper and printing conquered Europe because European society became so curious, hungry for new information that scribes could no longer produce enough books to satisfy it. Similarly, human tastes will probably prevent the computer from creating a world without paper.

Paper moves at a fast tempo and it's useful as a broad survey. Mr Kurlansky's historical judgments are often trite and not seldom wrong. He tells us that Europe was by 1500 "the most advanced civilization in the world," a traditional view contradicted by a mass of recent scholarship on Asia. His grasp of details is shaky. Mr Kurlansky describes medieval manuscripts as large and unwieldy. But Petrarch, whom he summons as a witness, carried his little, portable handwritten copy of St Augustine's Confessions all the way to the top of Mont Ventoux.

Though Mr Kurlansky mentions the oral traditions that persisted in the age of print, he misses something much bigger: the vast expansion of writing that took place at the same time. Even as printers filled the world with books, governments invested in vast new paper-management systems, impresarios produced handwritten newsletters for select clients, and scholars devoted their lives to filling notebooks with excerpts taken from the vast production of the presses and systematically classified under hundreds of topical headings. The age of Gutenberg was also the age of the "paper king," Philip II of Spain, who took to signing documents with a stamp and waved them around at audiences like a Renaissance Joe McCarthy. Seen in this light, the expansion in paper use that followed the introduction of the PC looks less strange.

The German journalist Lothar Müller, whose White Magic was published in English two years ago, does a better job of conveying these paradoxes in paper's story. He also evokes the varied ways in which writers and readers have ­responded to its strangely provocative white surface. Mr Kurlansky offers a versatile introduction to this long and complicated history. But a true historian of paper needs to understand that every page has another side.
© 2016 The New York Times News Service