Ian Sansom - Paper - An Elegy

Paper: An Elegy is intended in part as a technological and material history, but more importantly as a symbolic history, or a history of symbols, of how paper becomes sacred, and sacralised and fetishised, how it promises and provides us with freedoms, and imposes upon us clear boundaries. There is, alas, much paper that will be missing from the book: no decoupage; no exam papers; no musical scores; no Top Trumps. Online, such limits do not apply: we can just click through. (And let me mention here some words, phrases and ideas that might send you scurrying to Google – papier poudré, papillotes, papeterie, paper-ministers, paper-skulls, paperage, papercrete and papercreters, the infinite history of litter.) There are so many types and kinds of paper that I have had to leave unfingered and untouched. Among Japanese papers alone, there are, or were, hundreds of unexplored treasures: hiki-awase , once used as the inner lining of a warrior’s breastplate; hosokawa-shi , used for government land records; shibugami , the persimmon-juice-impregnated paper used for the sacks in which grains and cereals were stored; the rickshaw driver’s padded paper coats; the paper used to wrap medicines; the paper used to wrap a kimono. The sounds of different papers. The smells of different papers; the smell of ammonia used in large office print machines. The collection is not complete. But it has begun.

We have lived in a world of paper, and we are paper people. In Salvador Plascencia’s novel The People of Paper (2005) – a masterpiece of paper, on paper – a monk named Antonio becomes ‘the first origami surgeon’. His skills are extraordinary, but he is, inevitably, excommunicated, outcast and unemployed, until one day he retreats, alone, to a factory with a wheelbarrow filled with cardboard and napkins and books:

Antonio split the spines of books, spilling leaves of Austen and Cervantes, sheets from Leviticus and Judges, all mixing with the pages of The Book of Incandescent Light . Then Antonio unrolled the wrapping paper and construction paper and began to cut at the cardboard and then fold.

She was the first to be created: cardboard legs, cellophane appendix, and paper breasts. Created not from the rib of a man but from paper scraps.

This magnificent creature rises from Antonio’s cutting table, steps over her exhausted, dying creator, and strides out into the world.

Let us take her hand now and enter the Paper Museum.

All my books have really been counterproofs, or offsets, re-marques, like cartoons, those drawings made to the same scale as the grand painting or fresco but which are in fact only preparatory, and which are applied to the wall, and pricked through or indented: a mere outline or image of some greater design.

This book I like to think of not as a cartoon but as like John F. Peto’s ‘Old Scraps’ (1894), a miniature trompe l’oeil . Or a trompe l’esprit .

‘I am typing this book on yellow paper,’ announces the narrator of Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper (1936). ‘It is very yellow paper, and it is this very yellow paper because often sometimes I am typing it in my room at my office, and the paper I use for Sir Phoebus’s letters is blue paper with his name across the corner.’ The yellow paper helps distinguish the novel from the work.

Alas, I have adopted no such sensible system.

I have typed on a laptop, and on a desktop. I have read many books: paper books, Kindle books, Google books. I have read articles online, in print journals, and in magazines. I have made copies; I have pressed ‘Print’. I have written notes in margins, and I have written notes, by hand, in notebooks, and on A4 narrow-feint paper. I have organised my notes into folders. I have disorganised my notes in the folders. I have typed sentences, then paragraphs, then chapters. I have printed out these chapters, marked up revisions and corrections in pencil, and then incorporated these changes, and printed out the chapters again. And again. And again. And again. And then finally, I sent the ‘document’ by email to my editor, who suggested further changes. Some of which I ignored. Most of which I ignored. But some of which I incorporated. And all of which required yet more printing, and marking up and correcting, before sending it all off again. And then again. Proofs. More corrections. More proofs. Interminable? Inexplicable.

In total, this book is made from twenty reams of plain white 80 gsm copier paper, fifteen A4 lined, narrow-feint pads, four Moleskine pocket notebooks, six packs of A5 lined index cards, fifty manila folders (green), and three wrist-thick blocks of Post-it notes (assorted colours). I’m sure there are easier ways of writing books.

Too much? Too much. Not enough.

Japanese tissue paper with fine swirls of fibre

Making Japanese paper:

1 Stripping the bark

2 Soaking the bark in water

3 Beating the fibres to a pulp

4 Placing the paper mould into the vat of pulp

5 Drying and polishing the resulting sheet of paper

You are living, let us say, in Japan, two thousand years ago. You and your family have planted some trees – mulberry trees. The trees grow. You remove some of the branches of the trees and steam them in order to loosen the inner bark. You peel and dry and soak and scrape and rinse the bark. You find this pleasing: it turns the bark whiter and lighter. The fibres of the bark begin to separate. You boil the bark to soften it further, and then you bleach it in the sun. And then you beat it, and you beat it, and you beat it with a wooden beater and then you throw lumps of this bleached bark pulp into a vat filled with water. And then you mix it and beat it again. And again. You now have a vat of grey mush. You take a wooden frame with a sieve-like screen, dip it into the mush, scoop up the frame, tossing off the excess water, and rock it back and forth until you have a nice, smooth, consistent sheet of mush on your sieve. You allow all the water to drain off. Now you have a sort of damp mat of macerated fibre stuck to your sieve. You remove this mat from the sieve, and place it on a wooden board to dry. It dries, and you smooth it and polish it, maybe with some animal fat or maybe just with a stone, anything you can get your hands on to make it shiny and smooth. And then you trim the edges and admire your handiwork. Congratulations. You have produced a sheet of paper.

Basically, paper has continued to be made by this method throughout the world to this very day, and seems likely to continue to be made by the same method tomorrow. Compare the ancient Japanese technique to John Evelyn’s description of hand paper-making in seventeenth-century England, for example, from his diary, dated 24 August 1678:

I went to see my Lord of St. Alban’s house, at Byfleet, an old large building. Thence, to the paper-mills, where I found them making a coarse white paper. They cull the rags which are linen for white paper, woollen for brown; then they stamp them in troughs to a pap, with pestles, or hammers, like the powder-mills, then put it into a vessel of water, in which they dip a frame closely wired with wire as small as a hair and as close as a weaver’s reed; on this they take up the pap, the superfluous water draining through the wire; this they dexterously turning, shake out like a pancake on a smooth board between two pieces of flannel, then press it between a great press, the flannel sucking out the moisture; then, taking it out, they ply and dry it on strings, as they dry linen in the laundry; then dip it in alum-water, lastly, polish and make it up in quires. They put some gum in the water in which they macerate the rags. The mark we find on the sheets is formed in the wire.