The Nature of the Page. Joshua Calhoun

therefore obliged to devise other means for making Paper.” In response, they invent parchment, a writing material that “obtained its name from the city of Pergam, or Pergamus … the place where it was invented.”⁶⁰ The narrative of supersession continues: born out of necessity and ecological scarcity, parchment “greatly surpassed the Egyptian Paper in fineness, smoothness, and strength.”⁶¹ Parchment, in Koops’s telling, also surpassed papyrus, because it was made from a reliable, sustainable, abundant, and geographically nonspecific material. The spread of parchment and especially parchment-making, he notes, was far broader than the spread of papyrus because, once learned, the techniques of parchment-making can be practiced in any climate where animals can be raised.

      So, according to Substances, boards as a writing medium are superseded by leaves, which are superseded by the inner bark of trees, which are superseded by the rinds of papyrus plants, which are superseded by parchment. The title promises a historical account of substances “From the Earliest Date, to the Invention of Paper,” and at the bottom of page 46, almost exactly halfway through the 91-page volume, Koops turns to paper. His history of paper and papermaking follows the same pattern as his history of substances used before the invention of paper: paper from linen rags superseded paper from cotton rags partially because flax grows more abundantly in Europe. Notably, Koops claims “that the Greeks made use of cotton-paper sooner than the Latins; and that it was brought into Europe by the Greeks, earlier than by the Moors from Spain”; as a result, he says, in Germany cotton paper “was known in the 9th century by the name of Greek parchment.”⁶² That “Greek parchment” would be used to designate cotton paper highlights the recursivity of supersession narratives: the superseding object (paper in this case) makes sense of itself by reference to the presence or memory of the superseded object (parchment).⁶³ Indeed, Koops refers to manuscripts from tenth- to twelfth-century Spain that are “intermixed parchment and thick cotton-paper leaves.” Scarcity is the reason for intermixing, he suggests, but he cannot determine if “cotton paper was scarcer than parchment, or that this mixture was necessary because sufficient parchment could not be obtained.”⁶⁴

      The same sort of incomplete supersession happens with cotton and linen paper in Koops’s account. According to Substances, the use of cotton paper in England “continued till the latter end of the 14th century,” he says, before it was “gradually supplanted by linen-paper.”⁶⁵ Here it is hard to miss the agricultural pun, intended or not, that comes into play with the word “supplanted.” But beyond wordplay, there is a literal shift in the direction of replacement. To supersede something is to sit above it; to supplant something is to trip it from below. Cotton paper is, quite literally, tripped up from below by a new plant, flax. And yet, as Koops notes, the change is “gradual,” not sudden. In Fabriano, one of the earliest and most well-known Italian papermaking cities, Koops claims that “cotton might have been some time before mixed with linen-rags, till the superiority of the latter was fully ascertained.”⁶⁶ Koops devotes ample attention to teasing out when linen paper was invented, but it turns out the when is in service of the where: nationalistic disputes abound when it comes to assigning credit for the innovation of linen-based paper. Koops ultimately sides with the view that the earliest-known linen paper was made in Germany in 1308. “It is, therefore likely,” writes Koops, “that Germany has the honour of its [linen paper’s] invention.”⁶⁷ By 1342, linen paper was in use in England, Koops claims, but it was not until the end of the seventeenth century that “the art of making Paper arrived to a great degree of perfection in England.”⁶⁸ But within one hundred years, production speed (and demand) outstripped supply in England, and, as a result, English papermakers had to import rags from Europe, leading to anxieties about the dissemination of nationally beneficial information and even the production of viable banknotes. Koops raises the concern, in contradistinction to the anonymous eighteenth-century writer cited by Hunter, that due to resource shortage, there might not be enough rags to make paper money.⁶⁹

      Extraordinary Scarcity

      As Koops had already lamented at the beginning of Substances, “The great demands for Paper in this country have rendered it necessary to be supplied from the continent. This supply is extremely precarious, and is likely to be more wanted, as the consumption of Paper increases, because the material, which is the basis of Paper, is not to be obtained in England in sufficient quantity. The evil consequence of not having a due supply of Rags has been the stoppage of a number of Paper-mills.”⁷⁰ According to Koops, though “all Europe has of late years experienced an extraordinary scarcity” of rags, England struggled more than any other country because it relied on raw materials from abroad.⁷¹ Parliament had already responded to rag scarcity by allowing rags, nets, old ropes, and waste paper to be imported duty-free. And yet, claims Koops, such measures were stopgaps, not solutions; in his words, they “cannot sufficiently obviate the lamentable scarcity.”⁷² Koops’s appeal ultimately hinges on the argument that continued rag dependence is shortsighted, as are attempts to fix the problem economically (duty-free imports of raw materials), politically (sanctions on exports of certain materials to certain countries), and socially (appealing to citizens to be better stewards of rags).⁷³ The narrative Koops tells about the past is meant to be instructive: the history of substances used to convey ideas is one of supersession, and so is the future of substances used to convey ideas.

      Koops was not the first to try to make paper from straw, and he does not claim to be. His claim, printed on the title page, is that his is the first useful paper made only from straw (with no rags added). By September 1800, the date given at the end of the preface to Substances, Koops had secured two patents related to his work on substitute materials for papermaking: one for extracting ink from printed and written paper, pulping the waste paper, and making new paper (No. 2392, April 28, 1800); and one “for a method of manufacturing paper from straw, hay, thistles, waste, and refuse of hemp and flax, and different kinds of wood and bark” (No. 2433, August 2, 1800).⁷⁴ His motive for printing Substances appears to have been twofold: to prove the success of his project and to appeal to the Crown to protect his trade secrets from foreign theft. By printing the book on straw paper, Koops demonstrates its viability. In numerous copies I have examined, Koops has signed the preface, perhaps to show that straw makes good writing paper as well (see Figure 6). In the latter pages of Substances, Koops claims that he has manufactured “several thousand reams of perfectly clean and white Paper, since the 1st of May, made from old waste, written, and printed Paper.”⁷⁵ His next goal is to make “the most perfect Paper from straw and other vegetables.” The paper “these lines are printed upon” is not yet perfected, he claims, but “this specimen leaves no doubt in my mind, that … I shall make straw-paper in as great perfection as that which is now remanufactured from waste-paper.”⁷⁶ And if the project fails? Koops makes the case that even if straw paper were only good for “pasteboards, packing-paper, and paper-hangings,” it will benefit the nation.⁷⁷ According to Koops, making paper-hangings from English straw has the potential of flipping an upside-down economic model so that, instead of sending money to the Continent for rags, England would be able to manufacture paper-hangings more cheaply and could then sell paper-hangings at a lower rate to European purchasers. Straw paper, Koops argues, is a win-win proposition that can drastically reduce dependence on foreign supply by substituting locally sourced (or, at least, nationally sourced) raw materials.

FIGURE 6. Koops’s signature at the end of the preface to Substances (1800). Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin–Madison.

      At the end of Substances, Koops adds a brief, seven-page (two sheets with seven of eight possible sides printed) appendix, which is posed as if it is an afterthought, but stands out to a reader because the paper on which it is printed is clearly not the same as the paper used for the rest of the book. The sheets are more pale brown than yellow, and they are less coarse. Printed on this paper are these words: “The following lines are printed upon Paper made from Wood alone, the produce of this country, without any intermixture of rags, waste paper, bark, straw, or