On Paper: The Everything of Its 2000 Year History by Nicholas Basbanes
(Knopf, 2013, 449 pages, $35.00) accomplishes a feat you might not
expect, turning the prosaic topic of the paper we use each day, and
take for granted, into a topic of interest and importance. Beginning
with paper's emergence in China before the Common Era began, the
early chapters trace its development and the expansion of its use
from China to Japan and then, into the Arab world around the time of
Mohammed before following the path of Islam to Spain and thence into
Europe. In the Arab world and then in the West, paper became the
medium permitting language and ideas to move cheaply and with ease,
progressing with other technological developments to replace earlier
media like tablets and papyrus with an inexpensive and easy to use
way to communicate ideas and spread them throughout the world. But
language and words are only part of the story, and Basbanes wants to
tell it all. Therein lies both the strength of this fascinating book
and the weakness of its length. For just as the reader thinks the
whole story has been told, the author inserts significant events into
the story of paper which, while moving and worthy, stretch the book
beyond reasonable parameters. Meanwhile, the irony of reading this
book concerning paper on my Kindle during a period when one of the
most pervasive uses of paper is disappearing, never left me. While
many people speak to me of their love of the “feel” of a book, I
must confess that the rigors of increasing age make the electronic
book a wonderful adjunct to my intellectual life.
Making paper has from the beginning had
a few simple requirements: cellulose, plentiful water, and a screen
mold. The cellulose comes from plants, and the nature of the
individual plant, its fiber length and ease of manipulation has
always been a factor in its manufacture. Until the industrial
revolution, making paper was a hand made project. Makers in China and
Japan prized these qualities and requirements, making paper that was
both beautiful and utilitarian. The shape and composition of the
earliest paper structured the way Chinese characters were read,
because the sheets were long and narrow, making it more effective to
communicate Chinese horizontally. The paper thus manufactured was
used to help create the mammoth bureacracy ruling China as well as to
provide items of lightness and beauty for worship purposes. Later,
because Islam valued calligraphy, paper became the ideal medium to
copy and disseminate the Koran. During the middle ages, as parchment
scrolls illuminated by monks in monestaries gave way to paper and
then movable type make printing possible, knowledge became cheaper
and more widespread, and techniques for making paper developed. Soon
the best paper was made from cotton rags, only to be replaced by the
still cheaper and more available wood pulp. The manufacture of paper
tracked the ability of its makers to use machinary to make it in
larger and larger amounts which, of course, became increasingly
inexpensive.
What saves this book from tedium,
however, is not the technology, but the people who make, manage, use,
and love paper, not for what it necessarily carries, but for the
medium itself. During this exposition on the many uses of paper,
Basbanes travels to meet and interview people who love paper as much
as they value what it communicates and the multiplicity of ways it's
used. Imagine a book that treats Kleenex, Scott Tissue, and Tampax
with the same seriousness that it treats the curators of important
collections, the problems of preserving paper archives, and the
beauty of great books. But Basbanes does this and manages to make
these extremes palatable. We meet a Japanese National Treasure who is
the seventh generation of his family to manufacture beautiful (and
expensive) artisanal papers. We also come to know and respect the CEO
of a major paper company who has kept his company vital, growing, and
profitable by anticipating changes in the paper industry and
maintaining the core values of his company simultaneously. Librarians
are often pictured as dry and dusty intellectual bureacrats, more
interested in maintaining than in celebrating the glories they
protect. Basbane visits and interviews curators and librarians who
value the content and the medium, allowing him to handle the books
because their tactile quality is a significant part of what they are.
We discover that Benjamin Franklin was not only a prolific writer and
deep thinger, but one of the most important manufacturers of paper
during the Colonial period. On Paper is
filled with such people and incidents.
Basbanes
is so fascinated by his topic, and so thorough in making sure he
covers everything, that he seems not to know when to stop. In the
end, the story begins and ends with the making of beautiful, both
visually and tactily, paper. But just as he reaches the end, he
inserts a profile of an important paper executive and an moving
account of the role paper played in memorializing and organizing the
events and outcomes surrounding the disaster of 9/11. Both these
pieces are effective writing, telling a story that needed to be told.
They would have been more effective included within the bookends of
the stories of quality paper manufacture or, better still, published
in a different forum. In addition to being filled with mostly
interesting details, On Paper
represents a solid piece of copious scholarship covering a vast
subject matter in an interesting and comprehensive fashion. The book
is widely researched and carefully sourced.
Nicholas A. Basbanes
A
native of Lowell, Massachusetts, Nicholas A. Basbanes graduated from
Bates College in 1965, received a master of arts degree from
Pennsylvania State University in 1968, and served as a naval officer
aboard the aircraft carrier Oriskany in the Tonkin Gulf in 1969 and
1970. An award-winning investigative reporter during the early 1970s,
Basbanes was literary editor of the Worcester Sunday Telegram from
1978 to 1991, and for eight years after that wrote a nationally
syndicated column on books and authors. He is a former president of
the Friends of the Robert H. Goddard Library of Clark University,
which has established a student book collecting competition in his
honor.
On Paper: The Everything of its 2000 Year History
by Nicholas Basbanes (Knopf, 2013, 449 pages, $35.00) is a useful and
interesting volume for people who love books, but it expands beyond
such narrow focus as itfunctions as both social and intellectual
history. The writing is lively, combining Basbane's wide experience
as both an investigative journalist and a scholar. I read On
Paper as an electronic galley
supplied to me by the publisher through Edelweiss: Beyond the Tree
Line. I read it (irony of ironies) on my Kindle.
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