The Nature of the Page. Joshua Calhoun

He had successfully produced and printed on paper made from wood alone, with no additives. And the paper remains intact in all of the editions I have examined.⁷⁹ Even in 1801, when Koops expanded Substances and printed the main part of some editions on “Paper Re-made from Old Printed and Written Paper” instead of on straw paper, the wood-pulp paper appendix is still present. However, only in the 1800 edition do we find, at the end of the volume, a small ornament that might well be an emblem of Substances as a whole: the image of a gravestone, engraved with the word “FINIS” in front of a chopped-up tree and a setting sun.⁸⁰ The future of paper, as Koops figured out, was to be found in the harvesting of trees.

      Looking backward from 1800, Koops sees how bookmaking brought the world to the cusp of the Industrial Revolution; looking forward, he sees the possibility of establishing the manufacture of paper in England using a substance, straw, that is available in a sustainable, abundant supply. The book itself is addressed to King George III and framed as an appeal about licensing and patents more than as a persuasive work of book history scholarship. And yet it is both. But whatever his talent for understanding the history of paper-making, Koops’s own project failed spectacularly. By 1800, he had secured three patents for papermaking—all three for experimental approaches to replacing rags with more abundant raw materials—and he was working at Neckinger paper mill in Bermondsey. By 1801, Koops had established the Straw Paper Manufactory at Millbank in Westminster, the largest paper mill in England. By October 1804, Koops was bankrupt, and the mill’s equipment was on the auction block, “ending the possibility of England challenging the European paper industry by using more easily available materials for making paper.”⁸¹

      FIGURE 7. Ornament from the last page of Substances (1800), printed on wood pulp paper. Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin–Madison.

      Koops’s narrative unsettles the sort of hindsight biases that do not often acknowledge that books are equal parts human ideas and nonhuman materials. The brilliance of Koops’s volume is that it simultaneously demands several kinds of reading, for its pages—the words on them and the paper itself—record a natural history of the book and, especially, of papermaking. When Koops writes about pages made from raw materials, he writes not about substrates, but about substances; not about inevitability, but about potential; not about books or media, but about memorials; not about ecological abundance, but about ecological scarcity. The irony is that Koops ushers papermaking into the industrial age of mass production.⁸² The coarse yellow pages of Substances, the pale brown pages of its wood-pulp appendix, and the story that Koops tells on those pages mark the end of an epoch of hand papermaking. Within a decade of Substances and of the failure of Koops’s paper mill, papermaking would be revolutionized (and industrialized) with the help of bleach and the perfection of papermaking machines. Raw materials would remain problematic and scarce, but by the late nineteenth century, the papermaking industry shifted westward, across the Atlantic Ocean and across the North American continent, as trees became the cheap and reliable plants that could be transformed into paper.⁸³

      The untapped resources of the American West inspired belief in the obviousness of what progress was and in a providential mandate to subdue and have dominion. Reproductions of American Progress were not included in nineteenth-century guidebooks to temper optimism. The story of paper is a similarly complicated narrative that, in many histories of paper, easily veers into encomium. One particularly adulatory history of paper imagines an uncomplicated, machine-driven paper utopia: “In less than half a century, the machines have entirely superseded the diminutive hand-mills which sparsely dotted the country, and gigantic establishments have risen up in their places. Paper-mill villages, and banking institutions even, have grown out of this flourishing branch of industrial art, and we behold with satisfaction and amazement, what has been brought about by the aid of a commodity so insignificant in the eyes of the world as linen and cotton rags.”⁸⁴ This is the Chronology of the Origin and Progress of Paper and Paper-Making, printed four years after Gast’s American Progress, and a fitting companion to it, for the story of early handmade paper is not pre-industrial, but proto-industrial. It is a story of questionable progress toward cheap raw materials and cheap labor—“cheap at any cost,” to cite Wendell Berry.⁸⁵

      Spinning Wheels

      Compared to Taylor’s seventeenth-century poem of praise for hemp and flax and to Thoreau’s paean to the commodities moving across nineteenth-century train tracks and even to Darnton’s far more recent Communications Circuit, Koops offers a striking perspective on the scarcity and abundance of substances used to record ideas. Reading Taylor and Thoreau, one could be forgiven for assuming that raw materials were always there—somewhere. The second half of Taylor’s Praise of Hemp-seed celebrates paper made from hemp and flax rags as a “rich commodity” worthy of excessive praise because, as Taylor puns, “all the world yeelds matter to my Muse.” That is, plant matter in the form of cellulose from around the globe yields paper, which in turn yields poetic matter about the global importance of paper. Taylor goes on (and on):

      No Empire, Kingdome, Region, Prouince, Nation,

      No Principality, Shire, nor Corporation:

      No country, county, city, hamlet, towne,

      But must vse paper, either white or browne.

      No Metropolitane, or gratious Primate

      No village, pallace, cottage, function, climate,

      No age sex, or degree the earth doth beare,

      But they must vse this seed to write, or weare.⁸⁶

      Reading Taylor, paper users must have known the story of paper made from plants was not so simple, direct, or domestic as his commendatory lines suggest. Perhaps Renaissance writers and readers knew about the fraught supplies of foreign paper the way we know as a culture, but do not operate as though we believe, that we will not always be able to rely on cheap, foreign fossil fuels. In an imaginary dialogue about the state of the country, printed in London in 1581, one of the interlocutors explains that “there was paper made a while within the realme,” but that the papermaker could not make his paper “as good cheape as it came from beyond the sea.”⁸⁷ The papermaker referred to was probably John Tate, the first papermaker in England around the end of the fifteenth century, but the complaint is the same made by Matthias Koops, the first straw and wood pulp papermaker in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

      When Taylor considers the origins of paper, how a plant like hemp (or flax) cycles through society and then “to paper doth conuert,” he is drawn to think about how human stories and plant stories come to be interwoven:

      For when I thinke but how is paper made

      Into Philosophy I straight waies wade:

      How here, and there, and euery where lies scatter’d,

      Old ruind rotten rags, and ropes, all tatter’d.⁸⁸

      Taylor goes on to imagine several specific origin stories in which paper becomes a rhetorical under-text that inflects and in some cases subverts the over-text. A Brownist’s “zealous ruffe,” for instance, might “Be turnd to paper, and a Play writ in’t.”⁸⁹ But the most famous lines that Taylor records in this poem imprinted into the fibers of plant-based paper are these:

      In paper, many a Poet now suruiues

      Or else their lines had perish’d with their liues.

      Old Chaucer, Gower, and Sir Thomas More,

      Sir Philip Sidney, who the Lawrell wore,

      Spencer, and Shakespeare did in Art excell,

      . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

      Forgetfulnesse their workes would ouerrun,

      But that in paper they immortally

      Do liue in spight of death, and cannot die.⁹⁰