The Nature of the Page. Joshua Calhoun
of dress,—of patterns which are now no longer cried up, unless it be in Milwaukie, as those splendid articles, English, French, or American prints, ginghams, muslins, &c., gathered from all quarters both of fashion and poverty, going to become paper of one color or a few shades only, on which forsooth will be written tales of real life, high and low, and founded on fact!”16 Within a couple of pages, the train has passed and Thoreau is back to listening to bird sounds, like the dismal scream of a screech owl, which, he claims, is “truly Ben Jonsonian.”17 In other words, soon after Thoreau ends his meditations upon the paper futures of sails and rags, he summons the ghosts of rags and sails past. Indeed, Thoreau scrawls all of these observations on the same kinds of material Jonson used to scrawl his ideas: flax, cotton, and hemp from recycled clothes and sails.
The sameness of source materials across centuries is most apparent in John Taylor’s celebratory poem The Praise of Hemp-seed (1620) (see Figure 3). In Hemp-seed, Taylor observes the same relationship between sails/clothing and paper that Thoreau rhapsodizes about. The hemp plant, writes Taylor,
makes clothes, cordage, halters, ropes and sailes.
From this small Atome, mighty matters springs.18
No stranger to the prosopopoeic narrative (Taylor’s 1630 collected works include Hemp-seed as well as an it-narrative called The Trauels of a tweluepence), in Hemp-seed, Taylor opts to tell the story as a wide-awake human narrator who celebrates hempseed’s many uses and then celebrates its second use in the form of paper (more than half of the poem is devoted to praising hempseed-as-paper). Less than halfway through the poem, Taylor writes,
But paper now’s the subiect of my booke,
And from whence paper it’s beginning tooke:
How that from little Hemp and flaxen seeds
Ropes, halters, drapery, and our napery breeds,
And from these things by Art and true endeuor,
Al paper is deriued, whatsoeuer.19
What we see, then, is that when Thoreau writes about papermaking materials at Walden Pond in the 1840s and/or when revising his manuscript in the 1850s, he describes the same raw materials Taylor was writing about across the Atlantic Ocean nearly two and a half centuries earlier. The material substance of paper is never really invisible, but it is always assumed. For most of the history of the book, rags make paper. It becomes a truism, even a common way of conceptualizing historical communities.20
Reading and comparing these two passages from Thoreau and Taylor, written two centuries apart on two separate continents, we might mistakenly assume that papermaking from hemp-, cotton-, and flax-based rags was a remarkably stable, sustainable enterprise. And yet we know from historical accounts that between the time of Taylor and Thoreau, both England and America faced severe rag shortages. In A History of Paper-Manufacturing in the United States, 1690–1916, Lyman Horace Weeks claims that “the history of paper-making in Europe and in the United States is shot through and through with the records of persistent speculating and experimenting in the endeavor to escape from the limitation imposed upon it by sole dependence upon rags.”21 The young, independent American “Republic of Letters” depended heavily on European rags—rags that were already in short supply in Europe. By the end of the eighteenth century, newspaper advertisements routinely admonished households to recycle their rags for the good of the community and, eventually, for the good of the nation, rather than reusing rags within the home. Susan Strasser cites newspaper advertisements as “evidence of perpetual rag shortage in the colonies and the new nation and of the papermakers’ strategies of propaganda, education, and entreaty, aimed at gathering enough rags to keep new mills running.”22
It is shocking, in retrospect, to consider how long it took for wood pulp to replace flax (and cotton and hemp) as the primary raw material from which paper is made, especially when “for more than a hundred years, the existence of the industry was constantly imperiled by this scarcity.”23 Weeks writes of the “curious and exceedingly interesting chapter” in American history “which treats of the persistent and not always successful struggle for raw material to keep the mills going.”24 He goes on to cite lists of hundreds of raw materials from which experimental paper was made, lists that include substances such as animal excrement, asbestos, asparagus, bananas, beets, brewery refuse, corncobs, cucumbers, dust, hop vines, horseradish, moss, peat, pineapples, pine shavings, turnips, and seaweed.25 American papermakers began experimenting with local natural resources as early as the 1790s as numerous organizations, including the American Philosophical Society and the American Company of Booksellers, offered prizes for innovators who could discover a suitable replacement for rags. Woven into the language of these inquiries and experiments is a patriotic optimism that the untapped landscape of America would yield a new plant-based substitute for rags. In 1785, the poet Philip Freneau reimagined Palemon, a character who appears in Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale and Shakespeare’s Two Noble Kinsmen, immigrating to America “to tame the soil, and plant the arts.”26 Well into the nineteenth century, American innovators were still struggling to find the plant that would help them escape dependency on European rags and realize their ambition of planting the arts. Back in Europe, some innovators were similarly drawn to the idea of making paper from native resources—not from an exotic new plant, but from some overlooked but viable source.
Fascinating stories of rag recycling, of rag-collecting propaganda, and of shocking materials like asparagus and excrement used to make paper are not uncommon. They tend to put all of the emphasis on humans, on book and paper consumers, and they often read like success stories where nations and industries, led by brilliant innovators and scientists, overcome austerity and adversity. As readers, we move through many of these bildungsroman-style narratives by turning paper pages, so we know there is a happy, paper-supplied ending. Maybe we even unwrap reams of printing paper emblazoned with arboreal logos so we can print out parts of these stories. Too often, though, the history of papermaking tacitly elides the fact that it took too many innovators far too long to find a suitable substitute for rags.
The Transformation of a Plant
In Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Order, 1450–1830, David McKitterick writes, “The real issues in papermaking lay in the discovery and development of raw materials to meet a growing demand from the printing industry. From the mid-[eighteenth]century onwards—and with mounting urgency as curiosity was fed by need—wood, straw, nettles and other vegetable matter were subjects of experiment and of competition, in a search for a material that was plentiful, cheap and reliable.”27 True as the observation is, it belies an intriguing conundrum: Which was the priority—“urgency” and “need” or vegetable matter that was both “cheap and reliable”? Historically, papermaking technology has been driven not as much by demand for paper as by demand for raw materials that could be obtained cheaply. The history of paper production, like the history of oil production, is a history of scarce nonhuman supply pitted against self-assured human demand. When “cheap and reliable” are the standards, especially where a sense of urgency is in play, a sustainable bargain, one that tends to balance supply and demand in a given ecosystem, is unlikely.
According to a well-known poem quoted by Dard Hunter in Papermaking,
RAGS make paper,
PAPER makes money,
MONEY makes banks,
BANKS make loans,
LOANS make beggars,
BEGGARS make
RAGS.28
In these lines, as in Darnton’s Communications Circuit (discussed in the Introduction), cycles of human use within a social economy are imagined as independent from the natural world. But rags do not simply come to be because of defaulted loans. To better understand rag shortage and the search for a suitable—that is, a cheap—plant substitute, we might tell a less anthropocentric narrative that begins well before the rag stage. “Papermaking is the transformation