Ian Sansom - Paper - An Elegy

And yet despite all these hardships, traditions of hand papermaking still survive. Gandhi famously demonstrated papermaking at the 1938 Haripura Congress, and ancient methods of Indian papermaking are still maintained in a town called Sanganer, near Jaipur, where all the paper is chemical-free, sun-dried, unbleached and naturally coloured. In Nepal, hand-made lotka paper is still made from the bark of daphne trees. And in Japan there will always be washi . ‘Why is washi so wholesome?’ asks Soetsu Yanagi, co-founder of the Japan Folk Art Society. ‘When we try to figure it out, we cannot help but think it is because nature is paper’s mother and tradition paper’s father.’ And England? In England, the Exotic Paper Company of Chilcompton, Somerset, makes a paper using elephant dung from Woburn Safari Park.

Meanwhile, in the giant paper mills, the machines grind on, the woodchips stewing in their alkali solutions, and the top-secret pulp recipes crying out like addicts at a meth clinic for their chemical additives. A recent Handbook of Toxicology and Ecotoxicology for the Pulp and Paper Industry (2001) lists more than thirty common compounds that are used to make paper: acrylamide monomer; alkenyl succinic anhydride; alkyl ketene dimer wax dispersant; aluminium sulphate; aniline green dye; anionic polyurethane; azo dye anionic; azo dye cationic; bentonite; bronopol-type biocide; calcium polyacrylamide; cationic starch; chlorine; colloidal silica sol; defoamer; fluorescent whitening agents; hydrochloric acid; hydrogen peroxide; N-methylisothiazolinone-type biocide; polyaluminium hydroxide chloride; polyamide amine epichlorohydrin resin; polyamine; polyethylenimine; rosin size dispersant; sodium chlorate; sodium dithionite; sodium hydroxide; sodium silicate; stearic acid; and styrene/acrylate copolymer. These are the chemicals and dyes that give paper the strength and the whiteness we so admire and desire. They are applied in two ways: either blended with the stock, to fill and load the space between the wood-pulp cellulose fibres, laid down like fatty-tissue deposits or little Botox-boosts; or sprayed and applied as coatings, like permatan, or varnish. When you pick up a book – when you hold a piece of paper – what you have in your hand is no natural product, no emanation of mind. It is the product of two thousand years of continual beating, dipping and drying. It is a testament to human industry and ingenuity – a miracle of inscrutable intricacy.

Hand-made fibrous paper incorporating leaves

Like poor blind Oedipus, my fate was sealed long ago, but I have only now solved the riddle, have only now found the path. In the late 1970s and early 1980s even the most non-selective and non-academic of secondary schools in England began offering a kind of rudimentary careers advice to pupils. At the end of the fifth year we were invited to meet with a teacher – let’s call him Tiresias – who had been entrusted with running the new-fangled punched-card careers guidance system. We had to answer various questions, and the cards on which our answers had been entered were fed into the school’s computer – an Oracle? – which eventually delivered its verdict on a till-type print-out. And so we children of Essex were taught to aim for careers as secretaries, receptionists, cabbies and mechanics. I was lucky. My destiny, apparently, was to work in forestry. Youth Training Schemes were available.

Thirty years later, and having barely set foot in a forest since, except for the occasional hike and adventure in Epping Forest, and in the fictional woods and groves of Greek myth and Arthurian Romance, as well as in the Hundred Acre Wood, and Where the Wild Things Are and The Gruffalo , I realise that I am in fact up to my neck in the leafy depths, drowning in the loam. Not a forester, but certainly a child of the forest, a denizen of the dusky dells and ferny floors. Wood is my fuel: this morning alone I came home with two reams of copier paper, two Silvine reporter’s notebooks, some gummed envelopes, five HB pencils, a Belfast Telegraph , a Daily Telegraph , a Guardian , The Times , a Daily Mail , The World of Interiors and Boxing Monthly . And I’d only gone into the shop for some stamps. I consume more paper, pound for pound, than any other product, food included. I am a paper omnivore. I devour it: any kind, from anywhere. (Or almost anywhere: in London recently I wandered absentmindedly into Smythson, the high-class stationers on Bond Street, one of those shops where the staff are even better-looking than the customers, who are anyway better-looking than anyone you’ve ever met, and where there are security guards on the door, and where a nice brown leather stationery bureau will set you back £1,500, and where the notebooks can be gold-embossed with lettering of your choice, and where, realistically, I couldn’t even afford a pack of cedar pencils.)

And of course, when I scribble and print on my piles and piles of virgin white paper with my Faber-Castell pencils and my decidedly non-state-of-the-art Hewlett Packard scanner-copier-printer, what I’m really doing is taking a big double-headed felling axe and laying it unto the root. Now I am become Death, the destroyer of … woods . If a ream of paper is roughly equivalent to 5 per cent of a tree – though such figures are notoriously difficult to calculate and verify – then at approximately twenty reams’ worth of notes, or eight thousand sheets, the book you are currently holding in your hands is the product of at least one entire tree, though that’s not including all the paper books that were read and consumed in its production, nor the paper used for its own printing and publication: the gross product cost far exceeds the one tree, and is probably at least a small copse. The world’s great forests are not in Canada, Russia or the Amazon basin: they are in bookshops, bookshelves and Amazon warehouses all over the world.

As soon as one begins to investigate and explore how and why we have made trees into paper one finds oneself in deeply troubling Oedipus territory – ignorant, blind, doomed as a despoiler – or perhaps more like Dante at the beginning of the Inferno , ‘ Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita/mi ritrovai per una selva oscura/che la diritta via era smarrita ’ (‘In the middle of the journey of our life/I found myself in a dark forest,/where the straight way was lost’). The poet Ciaran Carson translates Dante’s famous ‘ selva oscura ’ as ‘gloomy wood’: in tracing the history of modern paper manufacturing, the gloom at times seems overwhelming and all-encompassing, like the sudden approach of night, or like Malcolm’s army advancing towards Dunsinane at the end of Macbeth , creeping up unsuspected, camouflaged by boughs cut from the Great Birnam wood (a scene brilliantly, darkly depicted in Kurosawa’s 1957 film adaptation of the play, Throne of Blood : see YouTube). Light turns first to shadow and then to inescapable dark.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, paper manufacturers began to search for new papermaking materials. There were simply not enough rags to go around: in 1800, Britain imported £200,000 worth of foreign rags for papermaking, and prices were rocketing. In the words of Dard Hunter, author of the unsurpassable Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft (1943), what was required was ‘a vegetable fibre in compact form, easily gathered and handled and furnishing the highest average yield per acre of growth’. Wood was the obvious answer, and a man named Matthias Koops – mapmaker, bankrupt and inventor – came up with a quick solution. In 1800