The Molten Notebook

The other morning, I sat beside a stranger on the train. She had one of those electronic readers — a Kindle, I think — and I saw it flash out of the corner of my eye as she turned the pages.

Meanwhile, I was reading a book published in 1881 that I printed off the Internet. (A History of Paper: Its Genesis and Its Revelations, believe it or not.) The days I can’t find a seat, I pop in my earbuds and play podcasts from the Times or the New York Review of Books.

It’s hard to escape the sense we live in a transitional age. One hears of newspapers dying, offices going paperless, and authors creating their own e-books and podcasts.

With the news being what it’s been lately, it’s hard not to think of the old 8 1/2 by 11.

Papermaking image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Paper, as you may know, was invented in China. Legend has it that an enterprising eunuch named Cai Lun made the first sheet of zhi from hemp, rags, bark, and old fishnets. The emperor was so pleased, he named him a marquis. (These and the following tidbits are courtesy of Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World by Jonathan Bloom.)

The Chinese had written on the shoulder bones of oxen and on tortoise shells around  1600-1050 BCE, and later on silk and bamboo.  Writers brushed characters on narrow bamboo strips that were then strung together with cords. Perhaps this is why Chinese is still written in columns.

By the second century BCE, the art of paper had emerged. Early papermakers relied on rags that they beat to a pulp and poured onto cloth molds. Later they dipped molds into vats of mushy pulp — pulp from fibers of plants like jute, rattan, bamboo, and paper mulberry. The wet sheets were removed from the screens and dried.

As methods developed, so did the uses. In a story dated 93 BCE, an imperial guard recommended that the prince cover his nose with zhi.  The scholar Yan Zhidui asked his family, in one sixth century document, not to use lists of quotations from the Five Classics or the names of sages as toilet paper. Paper took shape as kites, clothes, and hats.

The chief use, of course, was writing. Courtiers left a paper trail of blue-green rattan paper for literary documents and white rattan paper for official edicts in the Tang period. Commoners made paper from grass.

Today’s commoner, at least this one, has a digital genie conjure a blog post from 1′s and 0′s of … is it light? Energy? What are bits and bytes made of, anyway? Speed and ease of e-life notwithstanding, there’s something romantic about the materiality of paper.