The Nature of the Page. Joshua Calhoun
from East toward West, and from human ingenuity toward nonhuman, natural resources. In Dard Hunter’s seminal Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft and in any number of scholarly and/or popular histories of papermaking, we find a chronological narrative that pans from evidence of the invention of papermaking about two thousand years ago in China (in the first or second century BCE) toward its spread across the world.4 By the end of the eighth century BCE, paper-making had spread to Samarkand (present-day Uzbekistan) and then on to Baghdad. By the thirteenth century, paper was being made in Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Spain, France, and Italy. By the end of the fifteenth century, it was being made in Germany and England. In 1690, the first paper mill, Rittenhouse Mill in Pennsylvania, was set up in the United States. By 1854, the first paper mill west of the Missouri River began operating in Salt Lake City, Utah.5
In these past-to-present, East-to-West accounts, a human desire to produce a media that can be used for recording takes center stage. Religious zeal, for instance, is often credited as the impetus for the spread of papermaking: Buddhist missionaries first bring papermaking technology from China to Japan and Korea; Muslims bring papermaking to Iraq, Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and, eventually, to Italy and Spain; Christian crusaders bring papermaking even farther west; by 1860, Brigham Young starts a paper mill in Utah.6 Nonhuman materials are discussed at critical transition points in the narrative—from plant-sourced papyrus to animal-sourced parchment to plant-sourced paper, from mulberry fibers in the East to linen rags to tree pulp in the West—but then they tend to disappear from view even as the very technology that brought those nonhuman materials into view begins to overwhelm and exhaust natural supply. But when, inevitably, resources become scarce, the nonhuman reemerges in the papermaking narrative as human innovators ask: What other substances might we be able to record ideas upon? This linear narrative from past, East, and human toward present, West, and nonhuman is an effective and compelling way of organizing a story that continues to be of interest to specialized and general audiences alike.7 It is also, like every story—like this story or like the one depicted in American Progress—a structure that makes some features more prominent and more important and other features less noteworthy and less meaningful. This chapter reverses the usual narrative, opting instead to tell the history of paper from present toward past, from West toward East, from nonhuman to human, offering a perspectival shift that allows us to see a plant-based media that has changed human and environmental history. It is a perspective, too, that allows us to see how little papermaking technology changed in Europe from the late 1300s to the mid-1800s. Only in the last century and a half has the papermaking industry relied on trees. For most of the history of printed texts, plant fibers, worn and used to rags by humans, then recycled, have been the primary source of material for papermaking.
Legible Sails
Ships, like those whose bright sails catch our attention on the eastern seaboard of Gast’s American Progress, help to frame this chapter about the plant substances that are used to convey ideas. This chapter’s reverse-chronological narrative begins with Henry David Thoreau watching tattered ship sails pass by Walden Pond in America ca. 1840 and ends with John Taylor, “The Water Poet,” in “a Boat of brown-paper” that is sinking into the Thames River in England ca. 1620 (see Figure 3).8 Ships, especially ship sails, are a shared point of reference for both writers. If we imagine some trick of spacetime by which these two writers find themselves side by side in an art gallery examining American Progress, we realize that Taylor would be confounded by the telegraph wire that strings all the way back to the Atlantic Ocean, and Thoreau would need to explain that technological innovation to him. However, the masted ships sailing in New York Bay and the book in Columbia’s arm would have been familiar enough to both writers. Both would have understood the ecosystemic relationship between ship sails and books, an ecosystemic relationship that was crucial to human communications from the spread of papermaking technology in medieval Europe through the Industrial Revolution and right up until the end of the nineteenth century.
FIGURE 3. Title page from John Taylor, The Praise of Hemp-seed (1620), sig. E4r. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Taylor would also need Thoreau to explain the locomotives puffing their way westward, and we can guess from chapter 4 of Walden that Thoreau might do so with conviction. Few sections of Walden mar the notion of Thoreau as a solitary hermit writing in the wilderness quite so much as the chapter “Sounds,” in which Thoreau devotes his attention not to the noises and songs of the pond’s inhabitants, but to the sounds and rhythms of the railroad just south of the pond. Two chapters earlier, Thoreau leveled an oft-quoted critique of the railroad—“We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us”—but in his chapter on “Sounds,” he likens the train’s whistle to “the scream of a hawk” and expresses appreciation for its daily rumblings: “I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me, and I smell the stores which go dispensing their odors all the way from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs, and Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe.”9 Thoreau writes about brandy headed north to farmers in the Green Mountains, and about cattle cars headed south out of those farms. He looks up from his book and sees “some tall pine, hewn on far northern hills” on its way to becoming a ship mast.10
As Thoreau may have known, the pine-trees-as-ship-masts conceit recalls the Old English poem “The Dream of the Rood,” a prosopopoeic narrative told by the tree that became the cross on which Christ died. The traveling-tree conceit also feints toward the popular “it-narratives” of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.11 In one relevant it-narrative that has received ample critical attention, “The Adventures of a Quire of Paper,” a man reading a printed sermon in a coffeehouse is suddenly accosted by the paper in his hands. “Though now offered under this form to thy eyes,” narrates the page, “yet know my original form was that of a thistle in the ditch that surrounded a farmer’s meadow.”12 The thistle then relates a story of pride and glory and devastation, of being harvested with the flax in neighboring fields and of hardships on the way to becoming a printed sermon. We are not surprised, at the end, to learn from the human narrator that it was all a dream. Like the tree in “The Dream of the Rood,” the talking thistle/quire of paper was “merely the vision of a drowsy fit.”13
When, in the midst of his reflections on trains and sounds, Thoreau thinks about torn ship sails headed north to be recycled, he ventures even closer to an it-narrative like “The Adventures of a Quire of Paper”: “This car-load of torn sails is more legible and interesting now than if [the sails] should be wrought into paper and printed books. Who can write so graphically the history of the storms they have weathered as these rents have done? They are proof-sheets which need no correction.”14 Pulp them into paper and print Moby-Dick on them and they will not tell better stories of the sea than the stories they already offer in their current, ragged state. And yet these sails are insistently non-prosopopoeic in Thoreau’s telling. If, as Christina Lupton claims, “the defining feature” of it-narratives is that “they are told from the perspective of an object or (less commonly) an animal,” then Thoreau’s sails do not qualify, for though they have recorded the history of the storms, they do not speak up.15 In “Rood” and “Paper,” the dreaming readers or auditors are accosted by objects. In Thoreau, by contrast, a wide-awake reader reckons worn-out sails to be “more legible and interesting” than a sea narrative printed on paper. Legible to whom? Is Thoreau implying that, touching his fingers to the wounds in the sides of these sails, he can recount a detailed narrative of a storm at sea, something rivaling John Donne’s “The Storm”? Perhaps there is a reader, some ancient mariner, to whom each stain and scar recounts a detailed story, but most would rather read Sea Wolf than a sail.
Watching the train pass and imagining its cargo, Thoreau moves from torn hempen sails and their relationship to books to worn-out cotton and flax rags and their relationship to real-life narratives: “These rags in bales, of