1

A MIRACLE OF INSCRUTABLE INTRICACY

Looking at that blank paper continually dropping, dropping, dropping, my mind ran on in wonderings of those strange uses to which those thousand sheets eventually would be put. All sorts of writings would be writ on those now vacant things—sermons, lawyers’ briefs, physicians’ prescriptions, love-letters, marriage certificates, bills of divorce, registers of births, death-warrants, and so on, without end . . . “Yours is a most wonderful factory. Your great machine is a miracle of inscrutable intricacy.”

HERMAN MELVILLE, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” (1855)

Japanese tissue paper with fine swirls of fiber