The Nature of the Page. Joshua Calhoun
but of nonhuman “Substances” used “to Describe Events, and to Convey Ideas.” The title page also advertised its own material history: “Printed on the First Useful Paper Manufactured Soley [sic] from Straw.”47 The vivid yellow hue of the paper is heavily flecked with organic matter. In archival libraries, under direct light, the paper can take on a shimmering quality as brownish flecks spark into gold flashes that appear and disappear as the pages are turned. The pages are rough to the touch, and page thickness is uneven throughout. The author’s claim that the paper is made only from straw is grander than it might sound, and it comes from someone who had a history of making grand claims that did not always prove true. And yet, more than two hundred years later, the paper used in the 1800 first edition and in the expanded 1801 second edition is consistently pliable and strong across numerous copies held in multiple locations.48 Koops acknowledges in Substances that his innovation was part of a conversation that had been happening in Europe for nearly a century among figures like Carl Linnaeus, René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, Jacob Christian Schäffer, and a dozen other “scientific men” who had recorded (on rag paper) their “ideas on substitutes for paper-materials.”49 Réaumur, observing wasps, realized that paper could be made from wood as early as 1719. Schäffer was making paper from wood and straw (as well as cattails, wasps’ nests, hops, moss, and cabbage stalks, among others) in the 1760s.50 “It is surprizing,” writes Koops, “that the observations of [these] authors … should not have been earlier attended to by … intelligent paper-makers, who had the road thus opened to them for their investigation.”51 Up to this point in the book, Koops has made the point that over and over throughout recorded history, human ingenuity confronts a scarcity of nonhuman materials, always with the same outcome: an abundant substance is made into a recording surface that supersedes what came before it. Koops relies on the authority of scientists to argue that rag paper is ready to be superseded: “These authors have stated, that as cotton, flax, and hemp, are the origin of paper and rags, other vegetables of a tender and pliable nature might probably be converted into mucilaginous pulp, and adopted in the manufacture of Paper; and farther, that those vegetables that are of a brittle and harsh nature, but which can be obtained in large quantities and at moderate prices, might by art and perseverance be made tender, without destroying that quality which is necessary to be retained in paper-stuff.”52 Koops set out to make paper from straw not because he believed he could make better, whiter, more beautiful paper from that substance, but because he believed he could make perfectly serviceable paper from straw that was also, though he would not have used the phrase, ecologically sustainable.
FIGURE 4. “Plants to Rags to Paper,” Joshua Calhoun.
FIGURE 5. Title page from Matthias Koops, Historical Account of the Substances Which Have Been Used to Describe Events, and to Convey Ideas, From the Earliest Date, to the Invention of Paper (1800), printed on straw paper. Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Substances is perhaps the most stunning conjunction of form and content that I have held: a book about the history of books printed on mass-producible paper made by replacing scarce, imported rag fibers with locally grown, abundant oat and wheat straw. Koops’s volume introduces itself as a history and a future of the book, and it outlines ways of thinking about book history that upend the most popular ways we have schematized the field of study. Substances is reference book and rare book, information bank and artifact. My home institution’s Special Collections owns two copies: one is in the vault alongside rare books, and the other is in the open reference stacks in the Special Collections library right alongside other modern books on the history of papermaking. The Library of Congress Subject Heading (LCSH) “Papermaking—History” and “Writing materials and instruments” groups Substances with indispensable reference works on paper that I have already cited in this chapter, such as Dard Hunter’s Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft (1947) and Therese Weber’s The Language of Paper: A History of 2000 Years (2007). The paper in Koops is lousy by comparison to the paper in many of the fifteenth-and sixteenth-century holdings, but compared to its neighbors on the reference shelf in Madison, the paper is beautiful, sturdy, and resilient.
Koops’s volume, with its titular emphasis on substances (not substrates), with its odd, coarse, yellow pages, inspires a different kind of story about the history of books and especially paper. Substances refuses to be a transparent medium made of limitless raw materials. On pages visibly made from straw, Koops narrates how various raw materials (trees, stones, metals, wax, bark, leaves, papyrus, skins) have been used historically “to preserve the remembrance of important events.”53 It is a history of things used to convey history. Negotiation among humans and nonhumans is at the heart of Koops’s story; the plant sources never drop from view or fade into the background. Because Koops writes in the midst of serious material scarcity, because the stuff of paper cannot be assumed as it so often is in book history narratives, because Koops himself has a stake in making the paper he describes, he is attuned to its plant origins in ways that we tend to overlook. Substances is a remarkable, and remarkably understudied, resource that deserves renewed attention.
Substances reminds its reader, over and over again, that writing surfaces used as conveyances for human ideas were first nonhuman matter. Koops begins his history of substances used to convey ideas in the ancient past, when “trees were planted, heaps of stone, or unornamented altars and pillars, were erected … to keep up the recollection of past facts.”54 As writing and alphabet systems developed, more complex means were used to recollect the past: “Since the art of writing was invented, several materials have been used on which was engraved or written what was wished to be conveyed to posterity,” and in short time, claims Koops, different kinds of substances were used to record different kinds of public and private writing: “A distinction has been made between public records and private writings. For the first; stones, timber, and metals, were chiefly used; and, for the latter, leaves and bark of trees.”55 The story that Koops tells may begin as a narrative of diversified formats used to distinguish between private and public records, but eventually, he settles into an arcing narrative in which one substance/substrate supersedes another substance/substrate. “The use of boards was superseded by the use of the leaves of palm, olive, poplar, and other trees,” he writes; then “the custom of writing on leaves of trees was superseded by the use of the raw bark of trees, and the interior bark” (emphasis mine).56 Pausing here, he notes that the language of books is rooted in trees: interior bark is called liber in Latin; these barks, rolled up so they could be carried about, are volumen;the word codex “notwithstanding its true meaning is the trunk of a tree … was adopted to describe many sheets of the said bark together.”57 Koops devotes some space to discussing various kinds of bark media from various locales, but only after noting that the use of inner bark (liber) is a short step away from making papyrus. In the narrative laid out in Substances, it becomes readily apparent that had northern-growing birch trees been more suitable for making writing substrates than southern-growing papyrus, the history of the book, and perhaps the history of civilization, would be quite different. Ecological availability and scarcity—we might say biodiversity—determine the course of paper and books in Koops’s narrative.
Intriguingly, when Koops turns to a consideration of parchment superseding papyrus, he tells an often-repeated anecdote about Ptolemy/Eumenes, but in a way that emphasizes not only political power, but also ecological scarcity and fear.58 In the usual story, Ptolemy wants a bigger, better library in Alexandria than Eumenes has in Pergamus, so he cuts off exports of papyrus (which Koops refers to as “Egyptian Paper,” though he clearly indicates that it is a precursor to paper). However, Koops suggests that Ptolemy’s decision might have been driven by ecological concerns: “It may be that this prohibition was not solely occasioned by jealousy, but from the fear that his dominions … would be again reduced to a state of ignorance for want of Paper, because the plant failed sometimes in unfavourable weather.”59