Paper - Mark Kurlansky

   2016; 354 pages (includes prologue and timeline).  Full Title : Paper – Paging Through History.  New Author? : No.  Genre : Non-Fiction; Technology; World History.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

    Mark Kurlansky poses an interesting question at the start of Paper:   What do humans do that other animals do not?

    At first thought, that might seem like an easy question, but finding an answer may take a bit more time than you’d think.

    Yes, our opposable thumbs give us all sorts of dexterity advantages, but lots of other animals have them too: apes, of course, but also pandas, opossums, certain frogs; and some birds, although the latter's is merely an opposable digit.  And as for the skills our thumbs enable us to do – carrying, climbing, grasping, holding, etc. – creatures without thumbs can also do all of these.

    We humans can build things, and alter our environment, but the author points out that so does a beaver when he builds a dam.  We wage war against others of our species, but so do ants.  We can laugh, play, and joke around, but so do cats.  We communicate with one another, but so do bees, wolves, and monkeys.

    No, the one thing that sets us apart is our desire, and our ability, to record.  We’ve been doing it since we were living in caves – drawing glyphs on walls, making scribbles on rocks, and eventually scratching grooves into clay tablets.  But those are all painstaking ways of leaving a message.  So it’s not surprising that mankind came up (independently, and in several locations in both global hempisheres) with an easier medium to leave marks on: Paper.

What’s To Like...

    The book’s title might seem misleading to some, as paper has hundreds of uses (gift-wrapping, tissues, toilet paper, etc.) most of which only receive passing mention here.  Mark Kurlansky focuses mainly on paper being used for communicating or for artistic efforts.  He also examines paper’s forerunners (clay tablets à papyrus à parchment à paper), and its purported replacement (paper à e-mail).  Throughout the book, and especially in the chapters covering the distant past, World History gets just as much ink as Papermaking Technology, and I greatly enjoyed that.

    Paper is divided into 18 chapters, plus a prologue and an epilogue.  The earlier chapters are a nice mix of chronological and geographical happenings, covering the various places when and where alphabets, writing, and drawing developed.  Such inventions spurred the need for something to write upon and devices to print with.  Once we hit modern times (around Chapter 14) the theme switches to technological advances, such as the birth of photography and the encyclopedia, new raw materials for papermaking, innovative uses for paper, how the paper industry copes with present-day environmental issues, and last-but-not-least, e-books.

    I was impressed by just how many raw materials have been used for making paper.  Some of the main ones are: flax, cotton, rags, bark, silk, linen, hemp, jute, bamboo, agave, trees, seaweed, esparto grass, abaca, and scraps from sugar cane harvesting.  Rags may seem out of place in that list, but it was actually the major starting material used in America to make paper for hundreds of years.

    The book is a trivia buff’s delight.  Some of the things mentioned that resonated with me are:

Jackson Pollock, Moses Maimonides, Li Po, and Fibonacci  (four of my personal heroes)

1001 Arabian Nights  (Kurlansky claims it is “essentially erotic literature”)

Pencils  (first made in England in 1565)

Book Fairs!  (first held in 1541)

Haiku and Origami  (I’ve written some Haiku, and am fascinated by Origami)

Calligraphy  (I practiced writing Chinese characters when studying Mandarin)

The Kraft Process and the Sulphite Process  (my company sells products for these)

Baseball Cards!  (I had thousands as a kid)

The Iliad and the Odyssey  (I will probably read one or both of these later this year)

Massachusetts  (named for a dialect of the Algonquin language)

Chiaroscuro  (say what?)

    There are some kewl drawings spread throughout the book.  The extras in the back include a Timeline, Acknowledgements, and extensive Bibliography, and a 25-page Index.  Mark Kurlansky has written a series of historical non-fiction books with one-word titles.  I’ve read two (“1968” and now this one), and have two more (“Cod” and “Salt”) waiting on my Kindle.  Based on Amazon and Goodreads reviews, those latter two are regarded as the author’s best efforts, so I’m looking forward to reading them.

Kewlest New Word…

Xylographer (n.) : a person who makes engravings on wood, especially for printing.

Excerpts...

    These small, portable books, which Aldus called libelli portatiles, are credited with changing people’s reading habits.  This, of course, is the technological fallacy at work once again.  Aldus did not change reading habits.  Rather, a change in reading habits prompted him to produce a different kind of book.  He could see that books were too big for the way new readers wanted to use them.  Books were no longer read only by learned monks and scholars at stands in monasteries and castles but by a broad range of people, especially in Italy and France.  People wanted to read while lounging in chairs at a café; they wanted to take books to work to read on breaks or on trips.  (pg. 137)

    The expansion in reading was not simply a by-product of the revolutions in France and America, but a widespread phenomenon.  It could even be argued, as Diderot did, that the spread of reading and its accompanying spread of knowledge led to rebellion against the old order.  This was why that old order, the aristocracies and clergy of Europe, were tremendously fearful of this increasing popularity of books and newspapers and reading in general.  In the late eighteenth century, people of all economic classes, rural and urban, the well educated and the little educated, men and women, young and old – everyone started reading more.  (pg. 237)

 As the scribes of old were keenly aware, literacy is empowering and a threat to despotic rule.  (pg. 186 )

    I don’t really have any quibbles with Paper, but have to admit that at times - mostly during the technical passages -  it was a bit of a slog to read.  I don’t think this is in any way the fault of the author; this is my second Mark Kurlansky book, and his writing skills are fantastic.

    Instead, I blame the subject matter.  I suspect it is difficult to make the manufacture of paper an exciting topic due to its inherently technical nature.

     I can relate.  I once had to write a 200-word essay on “Mining in Siberia”.  I was being disciplined for some sort of transgression in junior high, this was before there was anything like Google, Wikipedia, and the Internet, and it certainly didn't merit a special trip to the city library.  My only resource was the encyclopedia at the junior high school library, which, not surprisingly, had very few words to say about the subject.  It was an extremely time-consuming piece of penance, accomplished only by me getting very wordy and spreading a lot of bullsh*t in my essay.

    That was 200 words about Russian mining.  This book is 350 pages about making paper.  I’d love to know what Mark Kurlansky’s thoughts were as he sat down to write this book.

    8 Stars.  Let’s close this review with a pair of trivia questions from Paper; one serious, the other more tongue-in-cheek.  1.) What was the world’s first novel and when was it published?  2.) What, according to Pliny, are humans incapable of doing that other (similarly equipped) animals can?  (Answers in the Comments section.)