I don’t know of anyone else other than Mike Kurlansky who writes such a wide-spanning history of something so ubiquitous and fundamental of a commodity as paper. His previous book on Salt is also excellent, I’ll write a post on that later. It’s really great to see someone who loves the intricacies of mundane things that we in our modern world take for granted, but people even a couple hundred years ago had to really think about and ration, if they had access to it at all!
One of the big concepts he goes over repeatedly is the technological fallacy, that new technologies just appear if you study the thing long enough, and everyone immediately sees the usefulness of the new thing, and society is revolutionized in the impact of what is now obvious but was obscure back then.
This is not the case.
What actually tends to happen is there’s either a surplus or shortage of a commodity, and many many people think very long and hard about how to address the problem, and it gets solved bit by tiny bit. I’ll go into this later, but it’s not like Gutenberg conjured the idea of a printing press completely from nothing, and it’s not like his invention immediately turned the whole country on its head as is popularly believed. He wasn’t even the first European to use blocks to press ink into paper, let alone the Chinese printers who printed on paper centuries prior!
Without both the availability of fairly cheap paper and a literate populace to buy books, mass producing books with a press simply doesn’t make sense. A Roman inventor made a primitive steam engine, but they had neither the industry to utilize it nor the perceived need for it as the evil of slavery was cheaper. Anyone who wants to change the world with an invention would do well to keep this firmly I mind.
He starts by going over the very first writings historians have been able to find, tax records from ancient Sumer.
Tax records will truly outlive us all.
He goes over the first writing media, Sumer being famous for writing on clay tablets, but that was only for the elite literate classes, they dictated their writings to the great mass of people who needed to know. The first one-star review of Ea Nasir’s dubious copper quality comes from this era.
He also talks about other media people used, like palm leaves, beaten mulberry bark, and of course papyrus. He then goes into different paper types as well, from handmade rag paper, to industrial rag paper, and finally to wood pulp paper.
Something I didn’t know about paper of any kind, is it almost always has a coating on it called sizing, which holds ink where you write rather than it being absorbed and smudging horribly like it does on paper towels.
The improved supply of paper enables greater literacy and art uses, which increases demand for paper, which drives innovation in paper production, and that cycle continues.
If you’d like to see how a commodity changes society and changes that commodity in turn, Kurlansky nails that down extremely well!