Paper: An Elegy. Ian Sansom

But we buy no lottery ticket. And no chewing gum: no wrapper. No ticket for the train – which, anyway, has no timetable. (We’ll assume, just for fun, that there is a train, and a train station, and a house, and an office or workplace to go to – although without plans and schedules and surveys and backs-of-envelopes and blueprints and patents and maps and graphs, all of this is of course highly unlikely; not impossible, but about as likely as you being able to read these words without ever having read or written anything on a piece of paper.) We certainly shall not gaze at advertisements on the train, or at hoardings or billboards. Nor buy a cup of takeaway coffee, in a takeaway coffee cup, protected by a takeaway coffee-cup sleeve, and our nonexistent loyalty card can remain forever lost, forgotten and unstamped. Nor do we post our mail: there is no Post Office. So no Amazon packages. Nor do we spend our days printing out emails, filing papers in folders, filling in forms, surrounded by familiar wallpaper and family photos, sticking up Post-it notes, or writing ‘documents’ on screen and ‘filing’ them in ‘folders’. Nor do we read a magazine or a paperback at lunchtime, while eating a sandwich neither wrapped nor carried in paper, our greasy hands untouched by a paper napkin. At no point in the afternoon do we file our nails with an emery board, fix our make-up, or blow our nose with a tissue. No cupcake cases, no cake boxes. No business cards. No bills. No banks. No building societies. No insurance companies. A little industry, perhaps, a little government. Maybe some law and order. But certainly we smoke no cigarettes, wipe no bottoms with a wet wipe, wrap no presents, nor mark, correct or assist with any homework, read no menus, send no Christmas cards, pull no crackers, light no fireworks …

      Imagine for a moment that paper were to disappear. Would anything be lost? Everything would be lost.

      We have been using paper for around two thousand years. What began in China as a rare and precious material and commodity eventually spread and spread, like alarm and disease, and dreams and despondency, until the nineteenth century, when papermaking machines replaced hand production. Then things really took off, and the truly phantasmagoric age of paper began. The average office employee in the West now uses over ten thousand sheets of paper per year. If you live in America you consume, all told, about 750 lbs of paper per year – which is about the weight of seven bags of cement, or 150 bags of sugar – maybe more. If paper did not exist, then someone would have to invent it – Gutenberg, probably, because what use would his movable type have been without it? Paper is the ultimate man-made material. It’s cheap, light, durable, and can be folded and cut and bent and twisted and lacquered and woven and waterproofed so that it can be used in almost any way and for anything. What, boats? Yes. Clothes? Yes. Furniture? Yes. Houses? Yes. Weapons? Yes. Games, puzzles and toys? Yes. The wheels on high-speed trains? Yes. And we shall come to them all later.

      But these are only paper’s more prosaic uses. In Japan, cut as streamers, paper consecrates sacred places. In India, during religious festivals, cut paper, sanjih, is placed on the floor to produce rangoli, the beautiful decorative shapes and patterns that welcome the Hindu deities. In Switzerland, elaborate paper-cuts are used to ratify legal documents. In China, at a Taoist or Buddhist funeral, sacred papers are burned to ease the passage of the dead through to the other world. And in the stories of Sherlock Holmes, criminals are caught with the simple application of brain to paper. ‘“I have some papers here,” said my friend Sherlock Holmes as we sat one winter’s night on either side of the fire, “which I really think, Watson, that it would be worth your while to glance over”’ (‘The Gloria Scott’). At a glance, and just for fun, here is Holmes on paper: in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ he establishes, with the aid of his Continental Gazetteer, that a crucial piece of paper was produced in Bohemia; in The Sign of Four he even more quickly deduces, without assistance, that a piece of paper is ‘of native Indian manufacture’; his monographs on technical subjects include not only the celebrated ‘Practical Handbook of Bee Culture’, ‘Upon the Distinction Between the Ashes of the Various Tobaccos’ and contributions to the study of tattooing, ears, the form of the hand, the tracing of footsteps and the polyphonic motets of Lassus, but also a ‘trifling’ monograph upon the subject of secret writings, and one upon the dating of documents; and in ‘The Stock-broker’s Clerk’ he is able to tell Watson’s state of health from a scrap of paper:

      ‘Your slippers are new,’ he said. ‘You could not have had them more than a few weeks. The soles which you are at this moment presenting to me are slightly scorched. For a moment I thought they might have got wet and been burned in the drying. But near the instep there is a small circular wafer of paper with the shopman’s hieroglyphics upon it. Damp would of course have removed this. You had, then, been sitting with your feet outstretched to the fire, which a man would hardly do even in so wet a June as this if he were in his full health.’

      Just so.

      And as such paper logic relentlessly proceeds, so paper itself might be revealed to be the unlikely foundation of the world. In origami, we learn first to make a base, the bird base, or the frog base, and from this base we can build any number of shapes and models, constructing worlds from simple folds and creases. In the same way, paper has been the base, the foundation of all the curious folds and creases of our history: our economy, our art, our wars and our attempts to make peace have all been conducted by means of paper. Elementary.

      Yet, as we are forever being reminded, we are now entering a world beyond paper, or certain forms of paper. Everywhere we look, paper is disappearing. We can book and check-in on a flight without any paper changing hands (though we may still need a passport, and a visa, and a list to remind us to pack our passport and our visa, and onboard we may be glad of a paperback, and the sick bag, and the laminated emergency instructions, and the pre-thumbed in-flight magazine, and the wake-up paper face-wipes). We have ticketless parking, and e-books and iPads. And yet at the same time, paper is also proliferating: more and more books are being published; more barista-proffered paper cups dispensed; more and more homes equipped with their very own HP desktop printer. Is This the End of the Book?, the newspaper headlines endlessly ask. Will there be a continuing role for paper?

      Short answer: yes.

      This book will attempt to show, at much greater length, that reports of the death of paper have been greatly exaggerated. As the richly paper-fed French philosopher Jacques Derrida remarked, ‘To say farewell to paper today would be rather like deciding one fine day to stop speaking because you had learned to write.’ Derrida returns again and again in his work to the question – the questions, rather – of paper. ‘Seeing all these questions emerging on paper, I have the impression … that I have never had any other subject: basically, paper, paper, paper.’

      Paper, paper, paper. Anyone old enough to remember floppy disks will remember that paperlessness was once a universal goal among get-ahead office managers. But as Abigail J. Sellen and Richard H.R. Harper explain in their book The Myth of the Paperless Office (2001), it soon became apparent that technological development – and in particular the introduction of email, and network computing – increased rather than decreased office paper consumption. According to Sellen and Harper, technological change has not replaced paper use but rather has shifted ‘the point at which paper is used’: we distribute then print, rather than print and distribute. And anyway, the ultimate goal of all technological development seems to be a paper-like device on which information can not only be accessed, sent and read, but also marked up in a paperlike way. Paper remains the ghost in our machines. We are, simply, paper fanatics and paper fundamentalists: even when it’s not there, when it has been shown to be unnecessary or not to exist, we continue to imagine it, to honour it, and to wish it into being.

      The word-processing document I am currently typing onto and into, for example, has – for no good reason at all – the appearance of a sheet of white paper. In the corner of the screen sits an image of a waste-paper basket. There are margins. Paragraphs. The little page-counter at the bottom of the ‘page’ tells me that this is ‘page’ 4 – though how can it be, unless I imagine some vast Platonic paper mill somewhere behind the screen? My ‘wallpaper’ shows a misty mountaintop, like a mural or giant photo pinned to an imaginary wall. The great irony of the end of the age of paper is that the image of paper is everywhere increasing, and continues to determine the shape and scene of our writing and reading. This may be because paper is so useful as a metaphor