Where does paper come from? As you read these words, it appears as though the paper they’re printed on is a fairly solid, unchanging object. But if you look more closely at the paper, through a magnifying glass or microscope, you may be able to see that this thin sheet of paper is actually made up of multiple layers of tiny fibers that have bonded together naturally. In the process of making paper, batches of single fibers are laid down into a thin, even mat.
So, you are holding a batch of little fibers. Across the fibers’ backs, we have put ink in certain patterns. Behold, you and I can communicate!
Paper fibers are cellulose. They are produced by everything that grows, from mighty trees to fungus and algae. Some people believe they are the most abundant thing on the face of the earth. The fibers used in papermaking are tiny: If you have very fine hair and were to cut off a ⅛ piece, you would have something like a paper-making fiber.
Even though it’s tiny, a cellulose fiber is hollow, like a drinking straw. If the cut surface of a tree stump were magnified a hundred times, you would be able to see all the little open-ended fibers lying side-by-side. Most fibers flatten out when made into paper, but some retain the hollow center.
The first thing a commercial papermaker needs is processed fibers. In a process called pulping, all the cellulose fibers are forced loose from each other. Separating fibers is not easy. They hang together very strongly and must be separated using a grindstone, chemicals, or both.
In this magnified photo, you can see the many layers of fibers that make up one thin sheet of paper.
Once the fibers have been separated, they are floated in water. This way, the papermaker can control where the fibers go and what they do. The fibers will go where the water goes. The papermaker keeps them separated in water and then pours the water onto a sieve with a rim around it. The rim channels water onto the sieve so it doesn’t run off the sides. As water runs through the sieve, the single fibers are caught on the surface. That is how a paper-maker lays down millions of little fibers in a thin, even mat.
The cellulose fibers that make up a sheet of paper are held together by a natural bond that happens when fibers touch each other in water. Very weak when formed, the bond grows stronger as water is taken away. The more water that is taken away, the stronger the bond becomes. When totally dry, the fibers are joined in a new sheet of paper.
Pulping Fibers
In the early days of papermaking, fibers were often ripped apart by stamping or grinding plants while wet. Sometimes the plants were soaked first in lime pits or water in which ashes had been soaked. Early grinding was done with a mortar and pestle. Later, machinery was developed. Today, your newspaper is made with fibers ripped apart by forcing a length of log against a grindstone. The fibers are then called groundwood pulp. Also, fibers can be obtained from trees and other plants by the use of chemicals or a combination of chemicals and grinding.
To make new paper from old, like we do in this book, a papermaker simply reverses the papermaking process. Dry paper is put into water, and the natural bond is weakened. The more water that is absorbed, the weaker the bond gets. It gets so weak that when the water is agitated (as in a blender), the fibers will let go of each other, once again becoming single fibers in water. This is called pulp. When pulp is poured onto a sieve and made into paper, it finishes a complete cycle: from new fibers to paper, from paper back to individual fibers, then those fibers are made into new paper. That is recycling.
Paper was first recorded as an invention in 105 ad, in China. This was linked to a man named Ts’ai Lun, an official in the Emperor’s court. Many believed that Ts’ai Lun was the inventor of paper, but paper was probably being made before him.
Dard Hunter, master paper historian (see He Saved Paper’s History on the next page), believed the first paper was made by floating a hand mold on the surface of calm water. The mold was likely made from a piece of fabric stretched on a bamboo frame. Pulp was poured onto the fabric, and the mold was lifted from the water. The water drained, leaving a layer of fibers on the fabric. When the fiber layer dried, it was paper. Because pulp was poured into the hand mold, the method became known as the pour method.
Later on, a different method was developed: A large batch of pulp was put into a vat, and sheets were formed by dipping a hand mold into the vat. This became known as the dip method. The dip method began to replace the pour method in Asia, early in paper’s history. Making similar sheets rapidly is the main advantage of the dip method, so the dip hand mold came into greater use as demand for paper grew. Most papermakers used the dip method, including all hand papermakers in Europe and the United States. But some papermakers in Siam, Tibet, and other places kept on using the pour method.
This book deals mainly with the pour method. The equipment is easier to make, and a better piece of paper is made with less practice and experience. Also, a lot of pulp does not have to be prepared to make just one sheet. Regardless of what method you use, when you make a sheet of paper, you join a long continuous line of paper-makers stretching back unbroken over 20 centuries. Exciting!
The papermaker’s chief tool has always been the hand mold. A hand mold is made of a sieve material, surrounded on its top edges by a fixed or movable rim, called a deckle. In the past, the hand mold has been made of different things and in different ways. After the first cloth/bamboo mold, changes were made. In Asia, the sieves became woven mats of reeds, grasses, or finely cut bamboo strips. The mats rested on wooden ribs in a frame. After the mold was dipped into a vat, the mat could be lifted from the frame for the next paper-making steps.
When wire was invented in Europe, in the middle of the fourteenth century, it was used instead of the reeds, grasses, and bamboo strips. Strung in strands from one side of a frame to the other, it became known as the screen. Around 1750, paper-makers began to use woven wire for their molds. Instead of strands running in one direction, it was like the screen you now use to make your sheet (like the screen in a window). Papermakers changed to woven wire because they believed it gave paper a smoother surface for printing. Paper made on molds with wires running in just one direction is called laid; often you can see the impression of lines running across its surface. Paper made on molds with woven wire is called wove.
He Saved Paper’s History
Much of what we know about the history of papermaking is due to a man named Dard Hunter. During a visit to a London museum, young Hunter became fascinated with hand papermaking. A scholar and graphic artist, Hunter felt a great desire to know more about the history of paper, its production tools, the people who invented it, and its geographical trails. His interest became a lifelong study.
In travels prior to World War II, he scoured China, Japan, Korea, and all of Asia, sites of the earliest papermaking. Then he turned to Europe. In each place, he collected paper samples and implements. He also noted methods of manufacture. Everything Hunter found, he recorded in books. He made paper by hand, designed his own font, and hand-printed the books he wrote. Between these rare handmade books, several trade books, and his museum, Hunter cataloged 18 centuries of papermaking.
His museum was first housed at MIT and later at the Institute of Paper Chemistry (where I had the honor of serving as its curator for six years). It is now at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, housed in the Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking.
Dard Hunter (on the right) with the author in 1964.
Early papermakers in the United States used both laid and wove molds. At first, they were all imported from Europe. Just before the Revolutionary War, Isaac Langle and Nathan Sellers started making them in the United States. Molds began to lose out when a Frenchman, Nicholas-Louis Robert invented a paper machine in 1798. It made paper faster than workers could do it by hand. Soon hand papermakers and mold makers alike had less and less work. Papermakers and mold makers in Europe dwindled to just a handful. In the United States, they disappeared altogether. But for more than 1,500 years, every bit of paper used in the world was made by hand. Someone bent his or her back to dip every sheet. (To see what a modern hand mold looks like, see page 53.)
The raised edge around the sieve of a mold, which keeps the water and fibers from running off the sides, is called the deckle. It is a part of every hand mold. In tin can papermaking (see page 42), the deckle is the small can you put on top of the screen. It not only keeps the water from running all over, it also determines the size and shape of the sheet. In methods using a standard mold and deckle, the finished sheet is rectangular. Want a different shape or size of paper? Use a different deckle.
In the pour method, the deckle can be quite high. In the dip method, deckles are shallow and may not rise more than ¼″ around the edges of the sieve. Whenever we speak of a hand mold, we are talking about some type of a sieve or screen material with a deckle around it. (For information on a modern deckle, see page 40).
Fibers from all kinds of plants have been used for papermaking. Sometimes, in the past, papermakers got their fibers directly from plants. At other times, fibers were taken from old cloth, rope, or other things plants had been made into. For many years in Europe and the United States, only rags were used by papermakers. They didn’t know how to get fibers from anything else. The rags were worn-out clothes made from linen (which came from flax plants) or cotton, also a plant product.
If you read a newspaper in colonial days, you might have seen want ads placed by papermakers offering to buy rags. You might have received three pennies a pound for them. In those days, three pennies bought much more than they do today. Benjamin Franklin was one of the rag buyers and sellers. He helped start a number of paper mills.
Because there were not enough rags in the colonies, they were imported from England, Germany, Italy, Egypt, and other countries. One papermaker said he could tell which country the rags came from by how clean they were. Rags played such an important part in paper manufacture, a little poem was made up about them (below). People still prize “rag content” paper today.
When did European and American paper-makers switch from rags to wood and other plants for making paper? Around 1850. Why? Because there weren’t enough rags to make all the paper people wanted. That made scientists look for an alternate base for papermaking. Papermakers in the Eastern world were already making paper from plants, but papermakers in the Western world didn’t know about it.
Scientists in Europe and the United States worked hard, trying many different plants. They even made experimental paper from things like algae and cow dung. Soon, paper was being made from straw. Eventually, paper was made by reducing trees to chips that were then cooked in chemicals. Trees are more or less big bundles of fibers. Papermakers have not had trouble with a shortage of fibers since.
Besides rags and plants, fibers have always been available from used paper. All paper is fiber. When paper is through being used for a letter or anything else, the fibers are still good. Fibers in paper can be taken apart much more easily than those in trees and used again.
Wasp Wisdom
While papermaking scientists were searching for a fiber source to replace rags, the humble wasp already had the answer. For centuries, it had been making paper — very good paper. It was the wasp’s house, and it had to withstand rain, hail, wind, freezing temperatures, and thawing. And every fiber used was not from rags, but from trees. If people could make paper from trees, there would never be a fiber shortage.
In 1719, a French naturalist named René-Antoine de Réaumur laid a report before the French Royal Academy of Sciences which read, “They (wasps) teach us that paper can be made from fibers of plants without the use of rags and linen, and seem to invite us to try whether we can make fine and good paper from the use of certain woods.” In 1765, Dr. Jacob Christian Schäffer, a German naturalist, read the report and proceeded to make paper in the laboratory from plants and wasp’s nests, adding 25 percent cotton fiber.
You, too, can make wasp nest paper. Find an abandoned — repeat, abandoned — nest. Usually, a nest is reliably abandoned following a deep freeze. To be safe, collect a nest in freezing weather, seal it in plastic, and keep it in your freezer for a while. After thawing it out, recycle it in a blender as described for any other fiber (see page 4). Recycling affects the wasp’s fiber, though, and your sheet might be weak. If so, either make a thicker sheet or add a percentage of brown grocery sack fibers.
And so we salute the noble wasp. When humans were still scratching on cave walls, the wasp had been making paper for centuries. However, it might be best to send our salute by e-mail rather than by making contact personally.
Probably no current product has been recycled longer than paper has — for more than 14 centuries. Evidence indicates the Chinese, who invented it, recycled paper in the fourth and fifth centuries. Paper recycling, to varying degrees, has continued ever since. It probably increased whenever a shortage of raw materials occurred and decreased when raw materials were plentiful and inexpensive.
In the Western world, from the twelfth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, all paper was made with recycled fibers. The respected cotton and linen rag papers of old were 100 percent recycled cotton and/or linen rags. Machines literally beat the rags back down to the individual cotton or linen fibers that made up the threads. No other industry has existed so long on 100 percent recycling.
In this book, “recycling” means taking paper (which is essentially a batch of dry fibers), turning it into individual fibers with water and a blender, and making them back into handmade paper. This book seeks to open your mind and eyes to the vast store of valuable papermaking components lying idle in the world’s stores of wastepaper. To think of these fibers as “used” would be like thinking of a new car driven home from a dealer’s showroom as “used” and then throwing it away. A simple fact needs recognition: Wastepaper is not waste fiber.
The paper industry’s finest treasures (not only fibers, but additives and color from dyes) are in wastepaper piles and available to hand papermakers absolutely free. The beautiful three- or four-color handmade sheet that can be made in four minutes by recycling would take days, money, and equipment to make if the papermaker started with new white pulp.
Every different type of paper you recycle gives you a different kind of handmade sheet. This happens because there is a difference between pulp and furnish. Pulp is simply fibers. Furnish is fibers plus additives. Furnish is a recipe of fibers, sizing, fillers, optical brighteners, and so forth. Not much paper is made of just fibers.
Industry spends a lot of time, money, and research, plus testing and evaluating, to arrive at the right furnish. When they use new fibers, they have to find, buy, and properly add all the necessary additives. When you recycle, all the additives have already been selected, added, and paid for. For you, it’s free and only as far away as your wastebasket. By recycling, you can make handmade paper with every furnish ever created by the paper industry. Each different sheet you recycle produces a different (slightly or radically) handmade sheet.
Wastepaper is considered waste because it cannot be used again as paper, but the fibers are not waste. Their useful life has hardly started. Not only is waste-paper not waste fiber, but science shows that for some paper qualities, recycled fibers are superior to new fibers. They have been studied in hundreds of research projects, and the paper industry is relentless in its quest to use higher percentages of recycled fibers.
All and any paper can be recycled. If it can’t be recycled, it isn’t paper. Recycle everything to find out what it is you like to recycle. Just like new fibers, recyclable fibers run the gamut from cheap to the world’s finest. At the bottom of quality and cost are groundwood fibers, amply available as newsprint. At the top of the line are cotton and certain wood fibers pulped by advanced pulping technology, bleached for whiteness and/or further purification, and perhaps in a furnish, including opacifiers and optical brighteners. Here’s a bit of information about commonly available papers:
A Very Special Place
The Paper Discovery Center in Appleton, Wisconsin, is a very busy place. This hands-on museum celebrates all things paper, with a particular focus on the environmental aspects of modern papermaking. Visitors learn about the management of clean water for rivers, and about forest management to replace trees and foster wildlife habitat. More than 50 percent of the fiber used in the industry is recycled.
Four thousand students a year participate in a paper science curriculum, and more than 300 Scouts have earned merit badges in papermaking. And every one of the center’s 36,000 visitors, regardless of age, makes paper by recycling with an Arnold Grummer pour handmold. David Lee, the director, says that the Center’s goals are to energize an interest in science through the understanding of paper. Enthusiasm runs high, captured perfectly by a young visitor who told his parents, “Do I want to come back here again? Yeah, a thousand times!”
Newsprint. With newsprint you can make handmade paper that might contain a recycled comic strip (a big hit with kids) or a newspaper story about friends. Its short fibers are good for watermarking. Newsprint makes a nice gray sheet. One disadvantage is that the ink released from the fibers makes a rather dirty film or scum that gets on the papermaking equipment and can turn white papermaking screens gray. Avoid the ink problem by cutting off and using only the unprinted margins. Always clean all the equipment thoroughly after each use.
Home or business paper. This covers a broad spectrum of good-looking, highly acceptable fibers in good furnishes. They offer colors, as well as shades of white. Hold sheets to light to see if a watermark tells you the cotton content. Avoid printed ink effects by cutting away and using only the unprinted areas. Or use the inked sections to give a visual texture and color to handmade sheets.
Envelopes. These can be the backbone of white pulp supply. They are generally clean and range into the highest whiteness and the best fibers. They offer a wide range of colored fibers. Color from ink is bountiful from “security” envelopes where the inside of the envelope is printed with a colored pattern. Discard the glued flaps. Large envelopes often offer long fibers for strength. For pure white or colored pulp, use only the unprinted areas.
Bags. Many bags offer long fibers for strength. Custom bags from upscale department stores can offer great and unusual colors. Plain brown sacks offer a great natural earth-tone background for some botanicals. White grocery bags are the result of very expensive long-fiber, bleached pulp. A short presoak before blending helps but is not necessary. The long fibers tend to “flock” (see Defining Terms, pages 28–29) in handmade sheets.
Wrapping papers. These are a happy hunting ground for colors, unusual inks, and foils. Including them in the mix will result in dramatic mottling.
Magazines. Slick and shiny pages of any publication can be recycled. The fiber quality varies. Magazine covers offer unusual possibilities for handmade sheets.
Colored papers. These are dyed fibers and therefore a source of colored pulp for colored handmade papers. Because of poor fiber and dyes that run, avoid “construction” paper when recycling.
Superlative fibers. For superlative fibers, look for superlative uses. The paper used for programs (for concerts, drama, opera, etc.) is likely to be very high quality. The same is usually true of invitations to landmark events, anniversary programs, and publications from financial institutions.
Christmas papers. Harvest colored envelopes for dyed fibers; cards with lots of metallic ink; Christmas wrapping paper with color, heavy ink, or foil components; illustrations from cards to be surface embedded on next year’s cards; ribbons, strings, and more for inclusion in next year’s cards.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: I made a large art piece from recycled paper and noticed some of the colors have faded. Any suggestions?
A: Light is probably the most prominent cause of fading. Direct sunshine is a prime threat; so is continuous and prolonged exposure to incandescent and fluorescent light. Cheap papers having residual lignin (groundwood newsprint) fade the most and fastest. Cheap dyes (as in much construction paper) will bring fast fading. Lignin-free and colorfast papers may be candidates for recycling to lessen fading.
For prized papers, use common sense. Avoid long exposure to sunlight, bright room lighting, and continually changing temperature and relative humidity. Hang framed paper art at wall locations featuring mostly ambient light. Filters and safer light sources (special bulbs or fluorescent tubes) are available. Consultation with a paper conservator will be of value.
