The Nature of the Page. Joshua Calhoun

Taylor gives precedence to “the material and economic context”: Shakespeare defies death “because individual copies of his plays and poems were printed, bought, and sold.”⁹² Shakespeare, like the other poets listed, survives “in paper”—a claim that subtly plays with Shakespeare’s own observation in Sonnet 15 that “men as plants increase.”⁹³ As I discuss in the next chapter, the connection between poet and plant is not chiefly metaphorical but material, and it is recognizable in the handmade pages of early books in the botanical form of visible flecks of plant matter.

      Thoreau’s paper, by comparison, appears dull. Though still composed of rags, it is “wove” paper made by machine, and the pages of the journals he kept while at Walden Pond tend toward homogeneity.⁹⁴ Mark Bland writes that “modern paper”—with which Thoreau’s paper shares many visual characteristics even though the nature of his pages shares more ecological characteristics with Taylor’s and with Shakespeare’s paper—“is mass produced and production methods seek to minimise differences … in effect, the paper either effaces or standardises the history within it.”⁹⁵ At the Morgan Library, where I looked into the pages of some of Thoreau’s journals along with curator and paper historian John Bidwell, I became especially aware of how much can be effaced in the homogeneity of modern paper. I was struggling to read Thoreau’s terrifically scribbled handwriting and defaulted to the most basic of paleographical skills: striving to positively identify unique letterforms as a basis for decoding full words. On the page shown in Figure 8, one letterform immediately stood out toward the middle, left margin, a capital letter that had to be a Z. And suddenly, out of the mire of Thoreau’s scrawling on recycled plant-fiber rags, Zilpah White emerged. Zilpah White, the former slave whose Loyalist master abandoned her to fate when he fled the country in 1775.⁹⁶

FIGURE 8. Page from Henry David Thoreau’s journal while at Walden Pond. MA 1302.7. Thoreau, Henry David, 1817–1862. Journal: autograph manuscript: Walden [Concord], [1845 July–Winter 1845/1846], p. [87] “Over eastward of my bean field….” Reproduced by permission of the Morgan Library and Museum.

      White had gone to Walden Woods not to suck the marrow out of life, but to survive independently, and she did so with a flax wheel. In Black Walden: Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord, Elise Lemire explains that White’s former masters had a “spinning garret” for “spinning flax into the linen fibers that were then woven into fine table linens and other markers of wealth and gentility.”⁹⁷ Thoreau, telling White’s story decades after her death, writes that “she spun linen for the townsfolk, making the Walden Woods ring with her shrill singing.”⁹⁸ Zilpah White’s story is inextricably connected with the story I am telling about paper, and the role she played in the history of plants as rags as paper is largely hidden from view. “When slavery ended,” writes Lemire, “at least some former slave women were given one of their master’s spinning wheels as a means of providing for themselves.”⁹⁹ It was a short-term solution, however, for the work these women could do on small spinning wheels would soon be overwhelmed by industrial factories that could make linen cloth more quickly and more reliably and sell it more cheaply.¹⁰⁰

      Paper has a serendipitous and romantic and compelling and complex backstory, one that can begin to seem so obvious in hindsight, one that marches across the pages of history like Columbia across the bountiful landscape of the American West. Rag shortage becomes a useful foil in many histories of paper, for it creates dramatic tension while simultaneously introducing human-interest stories of ingenuity, pluck, and thrift. Rag shortage is certainly one part of the story, but an overemphasis on rags has made it easy to forget that rags, like books or clean drinking water or oil or cucumbers, come from somewhere and something. It is true that England lagged behind the rest of Europe when it came to paper production and “relied on imported paper for almost all of its writing and printing needs before the end of the seventeenth century.”¹⁰¹ It is true that when Richard Tottell, printer of law books and of the first anthology of English poetry and charter member of the Stationer’s Company, petitioned for exclusive rights to papermaking in England in 1585, he “accused the French of cornering the supply of rags.”¹⁰² But it is also true that, as D. C. Coleman observed over sixty years ago, English rag shortage could be attributed to three factors: “the widespread use of wool … the absence of a native linen industry … and to the fact that such linen rags as were available tended to be exported, particularly to France.”¹⁰³ Stories about paper have long focused on the human elements in the unbalanced rag-shortage equation Coleman describes: wool use, linen industry, rag exports. However, when we read between the lines—and beyond the linen—we realize that “rag shortage” is a euphemism for raw material shortage. Hidden below the canopy of the familiar, anthropocentric narrative in which “rags make paper” are dense understories of raw materials, of localized biodiversity, of bruised plant stalks and boiled animal hooves and of aching, dehumanized bodies. If we look closely, we begin to find stories in the fibers of historical paper that prompt us to recalculate the costs of supposed cheapness.

      CHAPTER 2

      The Word Made Flax: Cheap Bibles, Textual Corruption, and the Poetics of Paper

      A handmade sheet of paper provides documentation or physical evidence of a dialogue between human beings and nature.

      —Timothy Barrett, “Aesthetics and the Future of the Craft”

      In a controversial history of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Sean Shesgreen claims that one of the three reasons for the anthology’s remarkable success in the 1960s and thereafter was its so-called innovational use of “Bible paper.”¹ According to Shesgreen, “Bible paper had previously been shunned by anthologists: transparent and flimsy, it tears easily and bleeds profusely.”² But the use of “Bible paper” allowed The Norton Anthology to offer 60 percent more content than its main competitor in a text that weighed 25 percent less, and more pages with less bulk allowed the printers to use a smaller size (octavo-size rather than quarto-size).³ The new, flimsy-paper anthology was an unprecedented success, but that success might be qualified by considering the degree to which substandard paper ultimately affected student perceptions of the literature printed on that paper. What message did the new media communicate? Is it possible that the “flimsy” paper emphasized functionality over form, coding its printed contents as means to an end (an acceptable course grade, for example) rather than as avenues of aesthetic exploration? In short, what is the rhetorical effect of cheap paper, especially as a medium for supposedly cherished literature?

      Historically and conceptually, the anthology’s bookmaking innovation was hardly innovative. The flimsy paper is called “Bible paper” for a good reason: Bibles have a long history of being printed on cheap paper, as The Norton Anthology’s editors must have known. The trick of cutting paper costs to make a Bible more portable was used even before paper and printing: “Paris Bibles” from the thirteenth century were copied by secular scribes onto “tissue-thin parchment”⁴ to create a portable Bible “intended to meet the needs both of the student in the university classroom and the Mendicant preacher on a mission.”⁵ Printing-press technology itself developed only after papermaking technology reached Europe, bringing with it a cheaper alternative to parchment.⁶

      In Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England, Ian Green demonstrates that ”canny publishers used nearly every trick in the book to expand markets and maximize profits” on Bible sales, including the use of “cheaper paper.”⁷ As with Shesgreen’s discussion of Bible paper, scholars have focused on the increased portability, distribution, and ownership of cheaper Bibles. What tends to be overlooked are the aesthetic effects of the surfaces on which words appear. This oversight is particularly remarkable for three reasons. First, since current textual criticism has been deeply influenced by D. F. McKenzie’s work on the “sociology of texts”