Nicholson Baker - Double Fold - Libraries and the Assault on Paper

A preliminary sketch of Deck’s proposal appeared in 1847, in the Spettatore Egiziano, a newspaper overseen by the Abbas Pasha in Cairo. I haven’t been able to track this paper down, but Punch saw the item and produced an anonymous poem about it in the May 29, 1847, issue. “Cheops and Ramses, shake in your cere-cloths!” the poet writes:

They’re going to take the bier-cloths

That wrap the sons and daughters of old Nile,

From gilded kings to rough-dressed rank and file,

And turn them into paper!

Scientific American also got wind of the article, and published a brief note entitled “New Speculation” on June 19, 1847:

Mehemet Ali has found a new source of revenue, in the fine linen in which the immense deposits of mummies are wrapped, by applying it to the manufacture of paper. Calculations, founded upon mummy statistics, make the linen swathings of the ancient Egyptians worth $21,000,000. This is better than stealing pennies from the eyes of dead men.

In England, the paper industry possibly took the hint: Munsell’s record for 1850 includes for the first time a mention of Egyptian rags — twenty-three tons 19of them — imported by Great Britain. Then Deck sailed for America, and in 1854 his expanded proposal appeared in a publication received by some of New York City’s leading printers, newspaper editors, and papermakers: the yearly Transactions of the American Institute, a New York society devoted to the advancement of industrial and agricultural arts. Deck was aware that some readers, the “over sensitive,” may be repulsed by the notion of large-scale mummy mining, and he says that he himself would hesitate to despoil the fascinating science of archaeology of its choicest gems, “unless the requirements of the age demand it.” He poses this question for the squeamish:

I would ask them whether it is not preferable to employ clean and sound linen wrappings from a virgin mummy to the dubious rags collected from the loathsome persons of the Lazaroni who swarm the quays of the chief seaports of Italy and Spain, and are equally the pest and annoyance of travellers to the interior, and from which source more than four-fifths of the present raw material for paper is obtained.

A modern-day Abelard and Heloise, he suggests, might soon correspond on stationery that was once the “chemisette enveloping the bosom of Joseph’s fair temptress”—i.e., enveloping the corpse of Potiphar’s wife. And was it not conceivable that “a sheet of the ‘New-York Times’ be issued on the indestructible shroud of Moses’s fairer (Pharaoh) 20stepmother”? And the supply, oh, the supply! It was beyond calculation. There weren’t only humans in those mummy pits, after all. There were all the wrappings of crocodiles and cats, and those of the sacred bulls at Dashour, the burned bones of which, as Deck points out, were already being used to clarify syrup in the sugar refineries of lower Egypt. The tenderness that other cultures reserve for infants — the swaddling and cradling and bathing — Egyptian culture redirected at their dead. Dr. Deck invites inquiries from “companies or private speculators.”

Did the rag dealers and papermakers ever act on these suggestions? We know that Egyptian rags appeared for the first time in America in 1855, exactly contemporary with the publication 21of Deck’s proposal: one J. Priestly bought 1,215 bales 22of Egyptian rags at a little over four cents a pound. The next year, a reporter for the New York Tribune wrote: “It is within 23a very short time that rags have come from the Nile, and now it is quite a business. About two and a quarter millions of pounds came to New York from Alexandria last year.” That’s an awful lot of Nile rags. Some of these imports might have come from living people, but many, it seems fairly certain, came from the long dead. A number of the Alexandrian bales found their way up the Hudson and west as far as Syracuse, where the Syracuse Daily Standard —the same paper that would soon publish the tidbit about the Egyptian railroad’s fuel — printed a veiled confession in its July 31, 1856, issue:

Rags from Egypt. — Our Daily is now printed on paper made from rags imported directly from the land of the Pharaohs, on the banks of the Nile. They were imported by Mr. G. W. Ryan, the veteran paper manufacturer at Marcellus Falls, in this county, and he thinks them quite as good as the general run of English and French rags.

News of papermaker Ryan’s novel material reached an editorial writer for The Albany Journal, who described a paper “made from the wrappages 24of mummies.” The editorialist asked, “Could anything better illustrate… the intense materialism of America?” In 1858, the Syracuse Daily Standard included another corroborating tidbit: a Boston importer had bought forty thousand pounds of linen rags “said to be taken from Egyptain [ sic ] mummies”; when he threshed them, he produced thirteen thousand pounds of sand. And in 1866 a clergyman gave a sermon in which he claimed that during the Civil War, a New York merchant sold a shipload of mummies to a papermaker in Connecticut, who threw them all “into the hopper.” 25Said the clergyman to his parishioners: “And the words I am now reading to you, are written on some of this paper.”

Dard Hunter was oddly hesitant 26about the mummies. He didn’t mention the clergyman’s tale (given in Munsell’s Chronology ), he doubted the existence of the Syracuse “Rags from Egypt” item, and, although he included further reports of mummy linen in paper mills in Broadalbin, New York, and Gardiner, Maine (the Maine rag-sorters attributed a typhoid epidemic to the Egyptian linen), he wanted us to imagine that the “grewsome” material was used to make wrapping paper, not printing paper.

But upstate paper companies often supplied New York printers — the New York Tribune, for instance, got its paper from a mill near Niagara Falls — and Deck hadn’t established himself near Printing House Square in order to argue the cause of wrapping paper. Nor would the gentlemen of the American Institute (whose members included Horace Greeley, 27the Tribune ’s editor; Richard Hoe, 28the leading manufacturer of printing presses; and Nathaniel Currier, of Currier and Ives) have bothered to publish Deck’s “On a Supply of Paper Material from the Mummy Pits of Egypt,” following an article about street-paving, if the idea had appalled them. On the contrary, the idea interested them. Why not make mummies into newsboys, speaking in ink-begotten Bodoni?

Was The New York Times (or the Tribune, or the Sun ) ever printed on stock made, at least in part, from Egyptian mummies? Only a microscopic analysis of the constituent pulps would tell for sure, and even then the microscope might fail us, since papermakers mixed their furnish the way whiskey blenders 29mix their mashes, adding several pulps to one vat. One hesitates, in any case, to chop hundreds of little test samples out of old pages in the service of science — first do no harm. But there is a fair chance, I think, that some of the remaining bound volumes of the biggest New York dailies from 1855 through, say, 1870 entomb more than the history of the United States.

I called the Syracuse University Library and the Syracuse Public Library to see whether they still owned their old volumes of the Syracuse Daily Standard, since it is the one newspaper that we know was printed on Nile rags. They don’t. A firm called Hall and McChesney, 30long gone, microfilmed the Standard on acetate stock sometime before 1972, and both libraries deemed it an acceptable substitute. On microfilm, the “Rags from Egypt” page is blurred but legible, except at the outermost corners. The Syracuse Public Library gave its volumes of the Standard to the Onondaga Historical Association, which accepted them even though they had no space and already had their own copy. Richard Wright, the director of the Historical Association in the seventies, went through the duplicate set of papers clipping items of interest: he and his wife discovered several of the choicest mummy quotations I have cited here.