In 1861 the journalist, playwright and cofounder of the satirical magazine Punch, Henry Mayhew, gathered together the three separately published volumes of his bestselling books of interviews into one: London Labour and the London Poor; Cyclopaedia of the Conditions and Earnings of Those That Will Work, Those That Cannot Work, And Those That Will Not Work. Mayhew was an oral historian—the Studs Terkel of his day—and his was a modest attempt, in his own words, to “publish the history of a people, from the lips of the people themselves,” and in so doing to “give the rich a more intimate knowledge of the sufferings, and the frequent heroism under those sufferings, of the poor,” and thus “to bestir themselves to improve the condition of a class of people whose misery, ignorance, and vice, amidst all the immense wealth and great knowledge of ‘the first city in the world,’ is, to say the very least, a national disgrace to us.”

Vigorous, single-minded and determined to cause as much controversy as possible, Mayhew interviewed everyone, from prostitutes to thieves to cigar-end collectors to bone-grubbers, meat dealers, piemen, dog-dung finders, sewer hunters, mud-larks—and every kind of paper seller. He was nothing if not thorough. He interviewed sellers of pamphlets, and he interviewed sellers of tracts. He interviewed sellers of race cards, sellers of playing cards, sellers of almanacs, “conundrums,” engravings, prints, pictures, and “patterers,” those at the very bottom end of the market who were “engaged in vending last dying speeches and confessions . . . accounts of fabulous duels between ladies of fashion—of apocryphal elopements, or fictitious love-letters of sporting noblemen . . . assassinations and sudden deaths of eminent individuals . . . awful tragedies, including mendacious murders, impossible robberies, and delusive suicides.” But beyond and below even this lowly class of paper peddlers, he discovered, was another caste of people engaged in a profession “the most curious of any in the hands of the class I now treat of”: the wastepaper collectors. “Some may have formed the notion that waste paper is merely that which is soiled or torn, or old numbers of newspapers, or other periodical publications; but this is merely a portion of the trade, as the subsequent account will show.”

Mayhew’s subsequent account does indeed show the most curious of trades. The wastepaper collectors were canny, ruthless scavengers—Mayhew estimated that there were about sixty men engaged in the trade in London, who would earn between fifteen and thirty-five shillings a week—visiting offices, publishers, coffee shops, printers, publicans, anywhere and everywhere in pursuit of their precious. Interviewed by Mayhew, one collector enumerated the kinds of paper he collected:

I’ve had Bibles . . . Testaments, Prayer-books, Companions to the Altar, and Sermons and religious works . . . Roman Catholic books . . . Watts’ and Wesley’s hymns . . . I’ve dealt in tragedies and comedies, old and new, cut and uncut—they’re best uncut, for you can make them into sheets then—and farces, and books of the opera. I’ve had scientific and medical works of every possible kind, and histories, and travels, and lives, and memoirs . . . Poetry, ay, many a hundred weight; Latin and Greek (sometimes), and French, and other foreign languages . . . Pamphlets I’ve had by the ton . . . Missionary papers of all kinds. Parliamentary papers . . . Railway prospectuses . . . Children’s copy-books . . . Old account-books of every kind . . . Dictionaries of every sort . . . Music books, lots of them. Manuscripts . . . Letters on every possible subject . . . An old man dies, you see, and his papers are sold off, letters and all; that’s the way; get rid of the old rubbish, as soon as the old boy’s pointing his toes to the sky. What’s old letters worth, when the writers are dead and buried? Why, perhaps 1½d. a pound, and it’s a rattling big letter that will weigh half-an-ounce. O, it’s a queer trade, but there’s many worse.

O, it’s a queer trade, but there are many worse. Mayhew’s wastepaper sellers passed their wares on to “cheesemongers, buttermen, butchers, fishmongers, poulterers, pork and sausage-sellers, sweet-stuff-sellers, tobacconists, chandlers—and indeed all who sell provisions”—just as I’ve been offering my wastepaper to you.

There is much, of course, that I haven’t been able to include, and much that I haven’t been able to salvage. On a daily basis we all still use so much paper to note, to register, to measure, to account for, to classify, authorize, endorse and generally to tot up, gee-up and make good our lives that it would be a Mayhew-like or Joycean undertaking to provide a full history of all the paper in just one life on just one day, never mind in the lives of nations and peoples over two thousand years. Personally, this week alone, I have fingered and handled newspapers, magazines, books, notebooks, notepads, files, agendas, programs, dry-cleaning tickets, cinema tickets, parking tickets, boarding passes, peer review forms, school reports, and bills, invoices and packaging of all kinds, and my pockets as always are stuffed full with train tickets, money and receipts, so much so that sometimes at night I simply shake the contents out onto the floor, creating a paper shower that soon becomes a drift that eventually, if allowed, would overcome first my bedroom, then my house and then finally my life, like the famous American Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley, whose brownstone on Fifth Avenue in New York was filled from floor to ceiling with a lifetime’s junk, and who eventually died in squalor and notoriety in 1947, with the police removing over a hundred tons of garbage from their home, Langley having been crushed to death in one of the booby-trapped newspaper tunnels of his own construction, and the blind and paralyzed Homer perishing of starvation some days later.

Much of it must be tossed, then, and of course most of the paper in my life is dross anyway, but there is so much else from the long history of paper that one would want to sort through and to rescue from waste: the odd, adjunct history of paperweights and paper knives, for example, from the first exhibition of paperweights in Vienna in 1845 to the procedures used for the identification of paper knives in criminal history; the cult history of wrestling and boxing posters, which once adorned the barbers and grocers of my youth, and were triumphs of the art of the High Street jobbing printer; the natural history of paper in gardening, horticulture and agriculture, beginning with, say, the “melon paper-House” that Gilbert White made for himself in 1757, “8 feet long & 5 feet wide: to be covered with the best writing paper,” oiled with linseed oil, to make it proof against the rain, and ending with the latest graph- and vector-based methods for the construction and analysis of data in landscape ecology; the true story behind James Wyld II’s Monster Globe, erected in the center of Leicester Square in 1851, which stood for ten years, built ostensibly as Wyld’s contribution to the Great Exhibition, but was in effect a giant advertisement for his map and globe company; the magical properties of “soap paper,” as described in an article in The Paper-Maker and British Paper Trade Journal in 1915, which consisted of little booklets of satin paper coated with a compound of glycerine, spirit and soap, a boon to hikers and picnickers, who “need only extract a basinful of water from a clear brook and immerse a page or a small piece of soap paper in it, meantime dabbling it about freely, in order to obtain abundant saponaceous lather suitable for washing hands and face with,” the forerunner of today’s wet wipes; the pioneering work of computer genius David Huffman, developer of so-called Huffman coding, which forms the basis of various back-end applications in digital devices, including JPEG and MP3 files, but who was also a great paper folder, and who in his 1976 paper “Curvature and Creases: A Primer on Paper” explores the relationship between certain features of paper surfaces and computer-aided design; the ingenious history of copying paper, including recipes (such as that for Carbon Duplicating Paper in Pharmaceutical Formulas: Being the Chemist’s Recipe Book, vol. II (1934, revised edition), requiring 12 lbs. of lard, 2½ lbs. of Japan wax, 2 lbs. of Ivory Blue, and 2 lbs. of Prussian Blue); recipes, including one for “Thin Cream Pancakes Call’d a Quire of Paper,” from Mary Kettilby’s A Collection of above three hundred receipts in cookery, physick, and surgery for the use of all good wives, tender mothers and careful nurses, by several hands (1714), a recipe I have tested, purely in the interests of research, which consists mostly of cream, butter, sugar, eggs, flour and sherry, and which I can confirm is absolutely delicious; the serious art and science of paper forensics, as practiced by the doyen of paper historians, Peter Bower, who is the man to go to if you need to find out exactly how much linen was present in a rag-pulp mix in the mid-nineteenth century, and which soaps were used to wash the rags, and which stampers and beaters and sizing agents were used, and which dyes and colors, and how white is the white, and whether the surface finish was achieved by plate glazing or calendering; tales of the last paper-bag merchants in Spitalfields, east London, Gardners Market Sundriesmen, 149 Commercial Street, est. 1870, as related in what is currently one of the world’s hippest blogs, www.spitalfieldslife.com; and the exact meaning of the song “Paper Gangsta” by Lady Gaga (I think she’s complaining about her record label). “If all the earth were paper white/And all the sea were ink,/”Twere not enough for me to write/As my poor heart doth think” (John Lyly). “Tis not enough, but let me present you finally with just a few more pages, a few choice cuts and uncuts from the multi-bale history of paper. Five leaves left: paper and film; paper and fashion; cigarettes; religion; and science.

Daguerreotype of an eclipse of the sun, July 28, 1851

The history of the relationship between paper and film begins early, earlier even than one might expect, at the very beginning of the history of photography, in 1839, when William Henry Fox Talbot, an inventor and scholar of hieroglyphics, revealed to the Royal Society in London the secrets of his revolutionary photogenic drawing method, just as Louis Daguerre was announcing his own copper-plate process for capturing images to the French Academy of Sciences in Paris. In his book The Pencil of Nature (1844), Fox Talbot explains how in 1833 he had been attempting to sketch the scenery of Lake Como, in Italy, using a camera lucida, and that the results were “melancholy to behold.” Nonetheless, this failure, he writes, “led me to reflect on the inimitable beauty of the pictures of nature’s painting which the glass lens of the Camera throws upon the paper in its focus—fairy pictures, creations of a moment, and destined as rapidly to fade away. It was during these thoughts that the idea occurred to me . . . how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper.” Fox Talbot’s early image-fixing experiments required soaking paper in a solution of salt, drying it, and then either brushing or floating the paper on a solution of silver nitrate. This prepared paper would then produce magical results when placed under an object, capturing vivid, ghostly images when exposed for long enough to the light. From these exploratory paper-based beginnings—“fairy pictures”—within thirty years photography was being used, in the words of John Berger, for “police filing, war reporting, military reconnaissance, pornography, encyclopedic documentation, family albums, postcards, anthropological records . . . sentimental moralising, inquisitive probing . . . aesthetic effects, news reporting and formal portraiture.” By 1861 over two hundred photographic studios had opened in London alone, with nearly three thousand registered photographers at work in the capital, and throughout the rest of its history, through all of its complex physical and chemical developments and iterations—from heliographs to calotypes to daguerreotypes, niépceotypes, wet plates, dry plates and every other innovation since—photography has continued to rely on paper, either to print out or to print on. Even digital photography, which can do without film and chemical processing, still relies largely on paper to be printed, exhibited, and proudly displayed in frames.

And as with photography, so with cinematography: film has a paper substrate. The history of motion pictures, or at least of moving images, begins with phenakistoscopes and zoetropes, which used static images, usually printed on paper, on spinning disks or cylinders, and one could follow an interesting, flickering paper route the whole way through motion picture history, from the use of cut-paper figures in stop-action animation, say—from the early work of the French cartoonist Émile Eugène Jean Louis Courtet to more recent work by Tim Burton and the Mexican artist Carlos Amorales, reminiscent of the shadow plays of Indonesia (wayang), Turkey (Karagöz-Hacivat plays), and France (les ombres noires)—through the paper print process used to establish copyright of early film negatives, to the famously Benzedrine-driven memo madness of David O. Selznick, and the paperwork nightmares depicted in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985). But the real paper support behind film—cinema’s paper orthotics, as it were, the back brace of cinema—are storyboards. Initially developed at the Walt Disney studios in the early 1930s, these hand-drawn sketches, arranged in sequence to build up narrative scenes from single frames and shots, were first used to direct a live-action film with Gone With the Wind, for which a team of seven artists produced more than 1,500 watercolor sketches—mostly of the burning of Atlanta—that were pasted onto board, and used on location during shooting. Gone With the Wind was released in 1939. What’s remarkable is that at Pixar Animation Studios they’re still using traditional storyboard techniques today, carrying on for all the world like little Poussins—who famously referred to his drawings as “pensées”—using drawings on paper as necessary steps toward high-tech movie making. Harley Jessup, a production designer at Pixar, who worked on Monsters, Inc. and Ratatouille, has described a culture of paper drawing and picture making at the company’s headquarters in California that would not seem out of place in an Impressionist’s studio in nineteenth-century Paris. There are daily life-drawing and painting classes, open to everyone, and the story department employs between five and fifteen full-time artists solely to work on storyboards. And a storyboard, as Jessup explains, just to be clear, “is literally a 4˝ x 8˝ (120 cm. x 240 cm.) bulletin board covered with rows of 3.5˝ x 8˝ (9 cm. x 20 cm.) hand-drawn story panels”: no gimmicks, no gizmos, no computer-graphic design. These story panels are scanned and cut together to produce story reels—basic black-and-white cartoon versions of the film—and are only then replaced by computer-graphic sequences, developed using yet further hand-drawn sketches, paintings and sculptures. Jessup adds up the number of storyboard drawings produced for various Pixar films thus:

A Bug’s Life (1998)	27,555
Toy Story 2 (1999)	28,244
Monsters, Inc. (2001)	46,024
Finding Nemo (2003)	43,536
The Incredibles (2004)	21,081
Cars (2006)	47,000
Ratatouille (2007)	72,000

So, no signs of a paperless office at Pixar.

Nor in the great fashion houses of the world. It’s impossible to imagine a fashion house without its moodboards and portfolios, pieced together using pens, pencils, color photocopies, scissors and paste. The fashion designer John Galliano, for example, puts together vast research books: “I start with research and from there I build the muse, the idea, tell a story and develop a character, a look and then a collection.” Matthew Williamson does anime-style sketches. Peter Jensen draws with a black fineliner on white copier paper, creating images that look like cartoons. Vivienne Westwood draws clothes without bodies, like funeral garb. (It’s perhaps worth noting that the greatest ever television series about fashion—Ugly Betty—is set not in a fashion house, but in a fashion magazine, the fictional Mode: couture always makes most sense when reflected and refracted in coated glossy paper.) Bespoke tailors create beautiful suits from brown-paper patterns by rock of eye, while my mother and grandmother made our clothes largely by guesswork and Butterick and Simplicity patterns, bought second-hand from market stalls, or collected from magazines, and shared among friends and neighbors, samizdat-style, so that everyone we knew ended up wearing odd but identical homemade denim-look leisurewear. The rise of the paper clothes pattern, first developed in the USA in the 1860s by the indomitable Madame Demorest (née Ellen Curtis) and Ebenezer Butterick, who built vast empires on the back of flimsy tissue-paper patterns, arguably led to the democratization of fashion: paper made clothes.

And paper-made clothes. In England in the late nineteenth century an American music hall entertainer, Mr. Howard Paul, used to perform on stage wearing a paper suit, singing a song, “The Age of Paper,” by Henry Walker. The song goes like this:

In ev’ry shop one now espies

The last new thing is paper ties;

The coats of best blue wove are made;

But shirts, of course, are all cream laid.

A paper hat should you desire,

Or paper socks, say half a quire,

Or peg-tops of the last design—

You’ll get them all for three and nine!

For paper now is all the rage,

And nothing else will suit the age.

The closest thing to paper clothes actually having been all the rage happened in the late 1960s, when paper dresses had their brief but glorious fashion moment. In 1966 the Scott Paper Company offered a chemise-style dress for just $1, mail order, plus coupon: they sold 500,000 of them. Not to miss out, Hallmark soon began selling paper “hostess dresses,” designed to match a range of party napkins and tablecloths; and before you could say underpants there were evening dresses and wedding gowns, slippers, suits, raincoats and bikinis all being made if not entirely from paper, then at least from part paper, part nylon and rayon. One particularly eye- and spill-catching dress was advertised as the “Party Stopper,” a “Shimmering white mini with silver fringe, made of poly-plastic on Scott Dura-Weve paper. Wipe off and press again and again. $5.95 ppd.” Irresistible. According to an article in Time magazine in March 1967, “Real Live Paper Dolls,” paper clothing was so popular that one of America’s major manufacturers, Sterling Paper, was developing “paper resort wear,” so that holiday makers could leave their luggage at home and simply buy disposable clothes in their hotels. By June 1967 Mademoiselle magazine had as one of its cover stories “The Big Paper Craze”: “In terms of how much pow you get for your pennies, the paper dress is the ultimate smart-money fashion.”

The craze soon passed. But in Japan it never ended, because it had never begun: in the land where paper remains a thing of beauty as well as utility, paper clothes have always been a part of the culture. Kamiko, for example, is a robust kind of paper treated with starch that was often worn by priests and samurai during the Edo period (1603–1868), though the most famous wearer of kamiko was in fact a poet, or rather the poet, Bashō, who immortalized his outfits in his haiku, as Elvis hymned blue suede shoes and T. S. Eliot talked of turned-up trousers:

Japanese woodcut—paper garments

Shifu—not to be to be confused with kamiko, or indeed with Master Shifu, a character in the excellent Kung Fu Panda film franchise, voiced by Dustin Hoffman—is a spun paper yarn that can be used to make clothing of all kinds. The very finest kind of shifu is combined with silk to make the most exquisite gleaming cloth, and is still made today by the internationally renowned Sadako Sakurai in the small town of Horimachi, north of Tokyo. Unlike its American twentieth-century counterpart, Japanese paper clothing is no novelty wear. It’s sturdy stuff. Like the famous oiled and lacquered paper umbrellas, wagasa, traditional Japanese paper clothes are often treated to improve resistance to wind and rain. One particular kind of paper, momigami, is first treated with starch and then crumpled into balls until it’s so flexible and strong that it begins to resemble leather, and so can be made into clothes, bags and wallets, similar to Korean jumchi, or joomchi, which is made of layers of hanji paper laid together, oiled and beaten, and is an integral part of Korean national culture. (In fact, jumchi is so versatile it can be used to make both clothes and cupboards.) “It is estimated”—though how is not clear—“that 75 percent or more of the population of China and Japan wear paper clothing,” according to The Paper-Maker and British Paper Trade Journal in 1914. “The poorer class of Germany likewise indulge in paper apparel, as do a majority of the population of Mexico.”

The problem with indulging in paper apparel, wherever you are, and whenever you are, is that it has a tendency to go up in flames. One suspects that one of the main reasons the paper-dress craze died out so suddenly in the late 1960s is that everyone was smoking. It was the wrong material at the wrong time: to borrow the memorable words of Grace Slick, from Jefferson Airplane’s “Greasy Heart,” on their magnificent 1968 album Crown of Creation, “Paper dresses catch on fire and you lose her in the haze.” In 2011, newspapers in England carried reports of a woman whose homemade toilet-paper dress caught fire during a bachelorette party in central London: she wasn’t lost in the haze, thank goodness, but she did sustain serious upper-body injuries. A spokesman for the London Fire Brigade said, “There’s a serious side to this—candles can be lethal if you don’t keep an eye on them. Make sure candles and tea lights are placed well away from flammable items and clothing otherwise the results can be catastrophic.” And yet every day, all around the world, people indulge in a seriously dangerous paper ritual: they take a piece of paper, place it in their mouth, and set light to it.

In his book Cigarettes Are Sublime (1993), his celebratory “ode to cigarettes,” Richard Klein claims that “Extracted from its pack and smoked, the cigarette writes a poem, sings an aria, or choreographs a dance, narrating a story in signs that are written hieroglyphically in space and breath”; the cigarette, in other words, made from paper, works like paper: we write ourselves upon it. Cigarettes, in this Kleinian reading, are another of our paper props, or prosthetics, extending and articulating our very selves. A cigarette can of course be rolled in some kind of leaf rather than in paper, but this is hardly the symbolic smoke we all know and love. According to Ned Rival, another celebrant of the cigarette, in Tabac, miroir du temps (1981), “Tout le chic de la cigarette tient alors dans le papier” (“The whole chic of the cigarette resides in the paper”). The cylindrical white paper cigarette, one might argue—as many have—is a kind of displaced phallus, and thus a sign of sexual availability. It was certainly a sign of late-nineteenth-century decadence, with many artists and writers taking up cigarette smoking as an outward and visible sign of their inward and spiritual dissolution and decay. Nothing says I’m a despairing intellectual like sucking on flaming paper. Ned Rival is right: cigarette-chic is paper-chic, and this is nowhere more apparent than in the cult and rituals of rolling papers. As a child, rolling my grandfather’s cigarettes for him, using medium-weight green Rizlas, was an act of shared communion, a tacit passing on of knowledge from generation to generation, like the handing-on of the ever-present baton of the Sun on the dashboard of his truck (Rizla +, the brand name, comes from the word “riz,” being French for “rice,” while the “la” and the cross represent the name of the Lacroix family, who established the business in the seventeenth century). I once knew a man who used only French Zig-Zag papers for his roll-ups—which is fine, of course, if you are actually French, and living in actual France. He wasn’t. The famous face of the bearded Zouave on Zig-Zag packets remains forever in my mind the ultimate symbol of paper pretension. Decadence turns inevitably to stupid, as paper turns to ash.

If paper-suited cigarettes represent one of the great pleasures and evils of this world, it turns out that the next world too is tricked out in paper. Unsurpassed as a spiritual technology, and as a store of spiritual knowledge, paper remains the perfect multifaith, multipurpose platform for almost any religious event and occasion. Whether protecting ourselves with paper amulets, making offerings of votive slips, or nailing it to Wittenberg church doors, paper has the advantage over other popular spiritual technologies, such as, say, blood, animal carcasses, crystals, hair shirts, metal cilices or Scientology E-meters, being light, flexible, flammable, capable of being decorated and inscribed and not requiring batteries.

Perhaps the purest expression of paper’s otherworldly aspects are Tibetan lungta papers (“lung” meaning “wind,” and “ta” meaning “horse”), those beautiful small pieces of square, thin paper, printed on one side in one of five different colors—white, for water; blue, for sky; yellow, for earth; red, sun; green, air—and in the middle of which is printed a wind horse, which is a flying horse, which is an image of the human soul, obviously, surrounded by sacred text, with other animals depicted in each corner, and which are thrown up into the air to carry prayers, to bless a journey, or just for good luck. No confetti-banning priests in Tibet. When the roll is called up yonder, paper’s name will sure be there: as shide, the white paper strips hung on the shimenawa, the ropes hung at Shinto shrines to mark the division between the sacred and profane, and on the gohei, the wooden wands used in purification rituals; as the paper cutouts known as kata-shiro, cast into flowing water, as a curse and as a blessing; as hóngbaō, or ang bao, or ang pao, the little red envelopes containing “lucky money,” presented as a gift at weddings and at Chinese New Year; as joss paper, or ghost money, or Bank of Hell notes, burned as offerings in China and elsewhere, that one’s ancestors might enjoy peace and prosperity in the afterlife; as the kongming sky lanterns that grace numerous religious festivals throughout Asia, and increasingly at Western weddings; and as the piece of paper bearing the shem inserted in the mouth of the Golem, which brought it to life to protect the Jewish people; but definitely, definitely not as the text of the Shema in a mezuzah, which must be written on parchment by a sofer, a scribe; using paper for this purpose is strictly not kosher.

So much then for paper, religion and ritual. Enough already of folklore, God and prayer. One hopes, of course, as John Ashbery has it in his poem “From Old Notebooks,” that they are “Worth looking up, these tepid old/things,” but what about hot, new, shiny things? What about science and technology, and computers and engineering? We shall take it for granted, as everyone does, that what is now called “technology transfer” has always occurred and even now continues to occur through ideas being transmitted on paper, and that there is no such thing as what the down-to-earth futurist Buckminster Fuller in Critical Path (1981) called “telepathically intercommunicated wisdom.” This is obvious: scientific wisdom works best when written down, not least for patent purposes. Lab notebooks remain an important part of a research scientist’s equipment (Fuller was an obsessive chronicler of his own life and ideas). Obvious. As obvious as the fact that the history of science is first and foremost a history of argument, much of which takes place on paper. But it is perhaps worth reminding ourselves that not just the abstract arguments but also the very practical spaces of science, including the physical and social settings of research, the experiments, and the scientific visitor attractions, have also been determined by paper. Paper helps turn metaphysics into applied metaphysics. In the nineteenth century, for example, it helped turn natural history into a natural history museum.

Around the middle of the nineteenth century, Richard Owen, superintendent of natural history at the British Museum, decided that natural history deserved its own museum, and he set about making his argument on paper, in letters and in campaigns. In 1858, more than a hundred naturalists signed a letter to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, complaining about the display of natural history in the British Museum. Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwin put together a petition. Owen published a booklet, On the Extent and Aims of a National Museum of Natural History (1862). Money was raised. A competition was announced for the building of a new museum. Plans were submitted. Francis Fowke won the competition, on the strength of his perspective drawing. Interiors were sketched and designed. Plans became reality, and the new British Museum (Natural History), which we know now as the Natural History Museum, one of the jewels in the crown of Albertopolis, finally opened to the public on Easter Monday 1881. Paper had helped it happen.

Anecdotal accounts of the propelling power of paper behind developments in science and technology could be gathered ad infinitum, stacked like Mary Kettilby’s paper-thin cream and sherry pancakes. But to take just one particularly delicious and obvious example: the engineer Henry Petroski, in his memoir Paperboy: Confessions of a Future Engineer (2002), focuses on a brief but intense period during his early life, from August 1, 1954, to January 25, 1958, to be calliper-precise, when he worked as a paperboy delivering the Long Island Press in his neighborhood in Queens, New York. Petroski claims that this experience gave him a heightened sense of “distance, time, and number,” so much so that it helped influence and determine his future career:

How many papers a paperboy had to draw was math; how he delivered them was engineering. How many papers could fit in the bag was math; how many more could be fit in was engineering. How the bicycle moved with its load was science; how he managed to pedal it up a hill was engineering. How the papers were supposed to be flipped was science; how the papers were flipped was engineering. How the papers landed where they did was science; how the papers got there was engineering. How the newsprint soiled his hands was science; how he washed it off was engineering.

Or to take a more significant example: in his book on the discovery of the double helical structure of DNA, The Double Helix (1968), James Watson describes how the team at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge would build models—actual models, made of metal—in their attempt to understand the working mechanism of DNA. One afternoon, while waiting for some of the models to be constructed, Watson became impatient, “so I spent the rest of the afternoon cutting accurate representations of the bases out of stiff cardboard.” The next morning, he writes, he “quickly cleared away the papers from my desk” and set to work with the cardboard, trying to come up with a new shape and pattern to form representational pairs of cardboard bases connected by notional hydrogen bonds. “Suddenly I became aware that an adenine-thymine pair held together by two hydrogen bonds was identical in shape to a guanine-cytosine pair held together by at least two hydrogen bonds. All the hydrogen bonds seemed to form naturally; no fudging was required to make the two types of base pairs identical in shape.” By lunchtime, Watson’s lab partner Francis Crick was telling everyone in the pub that “we had found the secret of life.”

Crick and Watson’s discovery notwithstanding, The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is, of course, 42—at least according to the supercomputer Deep Thought in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (And why 42? According to one theory—there are several—the so-called “paperback line theory,” Adams picked 42 because it’s the average number of lines on the page of a paperback book. More likely, he picked it because it sounds funny.) As every steam- and cyberpunk enthusiast knows, paper played an important role in the development of computing, super-, real, fictional and otherwise, and continues to do so. Charles Babbage’s famous Analytical Engine, the first general-purpose programmable computer, relied on cardboard as an essential part of its apparatus. Indeed, Babbage had mocked up his earlier Difference Engine—like the Analytical Engine, a grand project undertaken but never completed, largely due to lack of funds, but partly due to the fact that he was an impossible man to work with—with cardboard cutouts, all worked out in his voluminous “scribbling books.”

Babbage’s perforated cardboard cards were inspired by and adapted from the cards used by Joseph Marie Jacquard in his programmable weaving loom, an important machine in the history not just of technology but of human evolution, according to Manuel De Landa in War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991), because it “transferred control (and structure) from the human body to the machine in the form of a primitive program stored as punched holes in paper cards, the earliest form of software”: paper helping to inaugurate not just the modern age of computers, therefore, but also the postmodern age of cybernetics; paper prefiguring the posthuman. In William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s novel The Difference Engine (1991), their Babbbage-inspired vision of a technologically advanced Victorian London, governed by Prime Minister Lord Byron, paper proliferates. Everyone carries a “citizen-card,” a kind of multipurpose identity-card-cum-credit-card, printers endlessly punch out paper tape, and “clackers” (programmers) are so named because of the sound of paper cards clacking through the big brass steam-driven computers. Fantasy? Reality: in the mid-twentieth century the computer giant IBM’s entire business was based on paper, with their famous punch cards (“Do not fold, spindle or mutilate”) being used to record units of information in the form of code, before being replaced by magnetic tape during the 1960s. And the sound of clacking can still be distantly heard today in the paper prototyping methods used by Microsoft and others to develop user interfaces. Modern paper prototyping is so low-tech it’s almost laughable: a method of sketching on-screen commands and instructions on paper, before spending millions in software development.

No laughing matter is the role—or roll, rather—of paper in the history of medicine and hygiene. We are accustomed now to surgical gowns, masks, caps, tape and bandages all being made from paper. But in the early seventeenth century, in the West, even paper tissues were unheard of. In 1613 Lord Date Masamune, a farsighted, one-eyed Japanese warlord, sent an envoy named Hasekura Rokuemon Tsunenaga to visit Europe, where he and his traveling companions caused a sensation, not least because they carried with them at all times hanagami—”flower” or “nose” paper—with which they would blow their noses or wipe their faces, or clean their hands, and would then discard, with James Brown–like panache. The Marchioness of St. Tropez recalled the impression this made upon the French: “When any one of the Japanese used the paper handkerchief and threw it away on the street they would run up to him and pick it up. They even fought among themselves in order to secure one of these priceless momentoes [sic].”

The custom of using paper to wipe and clean the hands and mouth probably goes back to sixth-century China, and by the fourteenth century, according to the scholar Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin and the Sinologist’s Sinologist, Joseph Needham, ten million packages of toilet paper a year were being produced in one province alone. The rest of us, however, caught on slowly: in ancient Rome, a stick was used, with a sponge attached to the end; Eskimos reportedly used tundra moss, or snow; and others have used mussel shells, coconut shells, corn cobs, pebbles, broken pottery, and whatever came to hand. Including the hand. The famous chapter of “wipe-bummatory discourse” in Rabelais’s Gargantua (1534), in the beautifully unrestrained translation by Thomas Urquhart (1653), has Gargantua explaining to his father that he has finally found, “by a long and curious experience,” the perfect way to wipe his bottom. He has tried a lady’s velvet mask, he says (“very voluptuous and pleasant to my fundament”), earrings (“they fetched away all the skin of my tail with a vengeance”), a March-cat (“her claws were so sharp that they scratched and exulcerated all my perinee”), gloves, sage, fennel, marjoram, roses, lettuce and spinach leaves. He has also tried sheets, curtains, cushions, carpets, a tablecloth, napkins, and a number of hats (“The best of all these is the shaggy hat, for it makes a very neat abstersion of the fecal matter”). Moving on to animals, he admits that he has tried a hen, a cock, a pullet, a hare and a pigeon, but eventually concludes that of “all torcheculs, arsewisps, bumfodders, tail-napkins, bunghole cleansers, and wipe-breeches, there is none in the world comparable to the neck of a goose, that is well downed, if you hold her head betwixt your legs.” A man named Joseph Gayetty is a great friend to the goose, having been the first person, around 1857, to manufacture toilet paper in the United States, where people now use on average 23.6 rolls per year—which would add up to a lot of geese. And about half a tree. According to current industry figures, approximately eighty-three million rolls of toilet paper are produced worldwide per day, by far the fastest-growing sector in paper production. Greenpeace’s recent successful campaign, Kleercut, against Kimberly-Clark’s use of wood pulp to make toilet paper from Canada’s boreal forest is both evidence of the power of conservation campaigning and a reminder of Gargantua’s words, that “Who his foul tail with paper wipes,/Shall at his ballocks leave some chips.”

And, finally, from balls to balloons, and the paper we continue to drive on, walk on, ride on and fly in. There was perhaps a certain poetic justice in the use of 2,500,000 remaindered Mills & Boon romantic novels to help make the top layer of asphalt of the M6 in England in 2003. The pulped novels apparently help to absorb sound—the endless silent crushing of romantic hopes and dreams. Paper has also been used to make wheels, on American railway cars in the nineteenth century, from giant disks of paper pasted together under pressure, and has played no small part in the history of manned flight. The Montgolfiers were a family of papermakers, their balloons made of paper and silk; the Wright brothers used paper models in wind tunnels to test their planes; and more recently a team at the University of Stuttgart has been attempting to develop a large-capacity aircraft with a paper fuselage (as well as its sound- and energy-absorbing capacities, paper as a material is, crucially, much cheaper than steel). Even higher and further, in 2008 Professor Shinichi Suzuki of the University of Tokyo announced plans to launch paper planes from the International Space Station. “We think from this experiment we will be able to create new concepts and in the very near future perhaps new types of airship from this design,” he told the BBC. Alas, the Suzuki method never worked out: the Space Age of Paper is yet to come.

The age of the paper boat, meanwhile, has been and gone. From 1989 to 1995 an American eccentric, Ken Cupery, produced an occasional newsletter for paper-boat enthusiasts called The Paper Boater, which proclaimed itself “The World’s Leading Journal of Cellulose-Based Naval Architecture.” The world’s only journal of cellulose-based naval architecture. Such an architecture did and does exist. A famous recent example is the eighty-foot-long paper boat built as a memorial to Glasgow’s shipbuilding industry by the great Scottish artist George Wylie, who sailed it down the Clyde in 1989, and then up the Hudson in 1990. But the greatest paper boater who ever lived was undoubtedly John Taylor, who started his working life as a waterman on the Thames, went on to serve with Sir Walter Raleigh and the Earl of Essex on the 1596 expedition to Cadiz, and on expeditions to the Azores, and who on eventually returning to England found that he’d developed a taste for adventure, and so embarked on a series of extraordinary escapades and publicity stunts that he hoped would make him rich and famous. Taylor was, in the words of Simon Schama, in Landscape and Memory (1995), “not simply some twopenny-ha’penny penny trickster spawned in the taverns of Bankside. He was in his way truly unique: a self-invented celebrity, a wicked parodist of literary pretensions, the populi of the dockyards and alehouses that lined the south bank of the Thames . . . irate in his opinions, obstinate in his passions, saucy in their expression, selectively high-minded, deeply politically incorrect, hugely entertaining . . .”

In 1614 Taylor challenged the poet William Fennor to a “poetic duel” at the Hope Theatre in London. He sold tickets in advance, and published an account of the duel after the event. He was defeated by Fennor, but no matter. He had established a useful model for his future activities, funding adventures using public money up front, and then cashing in with a pamphlet when it was all over. In 1616 he traveled from London to Edinburgh and back again on what he called a “Penniless Pilgrimage.” Then he wrote a pub guide. And a directory of carriage services. Ran a pub in Covent Garden. And in 1620 he traveled down the Thames in a brown-paper boat.

Taylor retells his experience in his poem The Praise of Hemp-Seed with the Voyage of Mr. Roger Bird and the Writer hereof, in a boat of browne-Paper, from London to Quinborough in Kent (1620):

I therefore to conclude this much will note

How I of Paper lately made a Boat,

And how in forme of Paper I did row

From London unto Quinborough Ile show.

The journey started well, but not surprisingly, somewhere off the coast between Kent and Essex, the boat began to leak:

The water to the Paper being got,

In one half houre our boat began to rot:

The Thames (most lib’rall) fild her to the halves,

Whilst Hodge and I sate liquor’d to the calves.

It was kept afloat by Taylor’s determination, by the bullocks’ bladders filled with air attached to the flimsy craft, and by the enthusiasm of the cheering crowds:

Thousands of people all the shores did hide,

And thousands more did meet us in the tide

With Scullers, Oares, with ship-boats, & with Barges

To gaze on us, they put themselves to charges.

The journey lasted three days, from Saturday to Monday, “In rotten paper and boysterous weather,” until Taylor and his companion clambered out at Queenborough Castle on the Isle of Sheppey, to be wined and dined by the local mayor. Taylor, in his usual enterprising way, had hoped to be able to exhibit the boat, but as he recounts:

But whilst we at our dinners thus were merry,

The Country people tore our tatter’d wherry

In mammocks peecemeale in a thousand scraps,

Wearing the reliques in their hats and caps.

What had begun in great hope ended in mammocks peecemeale (a “mammock,” explains the OED, is “a scrap, shred, broken or torn piece”).

We began our journey through the history of paper with Salvador Plascencia’s fantastic novel The People of Paper (2005). Let us end with Carlos María Domínguez’s equally fantastic The Paper House (2005), in which the protagonist, Carlos Brauer, becomes first obsessed and then deranged by books, so much so that on his bed there are “twenty or so books carefully laid out in such a way that they reproduced the mass and outline of a human body.” To overcome the relationship, to sever the ties, he commits the brutal act of building a house from his books, cementing them together like bricks, using “a Borges to fit under a windowsill, a Vallejo for the door, with Kafka above it and Kant beside it.” For a brief moment all the paper that had nurtured and educated him looks as though it might become a useful shelter and a shade for him and for others, but not for long, “because even in the heady tenacious hope of the printed word, made possible by printers, designers, secretaries, typesetters, commentators, writers, and messengers, craftsmen in inks and bindings, illustrators, prologue writers, cultured critics of memory, paper is an organic product that, like the pine trees on the road, sooner or later falls prey to the jaws of the sea in a silent, devastating collapse.”

Mammocks.

A paper boat, sinking