The history of paper

CHRIS HATZIS
Eavesdrop on Experts, a podcast about stories of inspiration and insights. It’s where expert types obsess, confess and profess. I’m Chris Hatzis, let’s eavesdrop on experts changing the world - one lecture, one experiment, one interview at a time.

What do you get when you take a fresh, green reed, cut it into lengths, lay it out on a flat surface and press it all together? Not a particularly tasty salad - but you may have just invented papyrus, the new vegan alternative to animal-based parchment. But how did we get from Ancient Egyptian scrolls to modern-day office paper? Perhaps our guests today can help us understand.

JONATHAN BLOOM
I'm Jonathan Bloom. I am retired as the Norma Jean Calderwood University Professor of Islamic and Asian Art at Boston College and I am soon-to-be retired as the Hamid Bin Khalifa Endowed Chair of Islamic Art at Virginia Commonwealth University.

SHEILA BLAIR
And I am Sheila Blair and I am also the Norma Jean Calderwood University Professor of Islamic and Asian Art at Boston College Emerita and soon-to-be retired Hamid Bin Khalifa Endowed Chair of Islamic Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. We should say this the first time from these two universities that we have shared equally two endowed chairs.

JONATHAN BLOOM
I was going to say will the real Hamid Bin Khalifa Professor stand up.

CHRIS HATZIS
Jonathan and Sheila were both at the University of Melbourne recently to deliver the 2019 Miegunyah Distinguished Visiting Fellowship Lecture on the history of paper. They also found some time to chat with our reporter Dr Andi Horvath.

ANDI HORVATH
Welcome to the studios.

SHEILA BLAIR
Thank you.

ANDI HORVATH
Can I call you Sheila?

SHEILA BLAIR
Absolutely.

ANDI HORVATH
And Jonathan?

JONATHAN BLOOM
Yes, absolutely.

ANDI HORVATH
Now, your expertise is broad but one little area of research that I'm fascinated to talk to you about is your research into the history of paper. Now, that must be a tricky one to do because surely the history of paper wasn't written down on paper and therefore it becomes very hard to actually trace. So, tell me about how you got interested in the history of paper first.

JONATHAN BLOOM
Well, my background is in the history of Islamic art and I was studying the history of architecture and I kept reading about how people said oh well, there are these plans, that architects use plans and I said if they used the plans, where were they, and none of them survive, and if they used them what were they written on? Nobody could answer that question and so I started looking.

I had had no interest really in the history of paper and I followed the lead and I realised this was a subject that really people hadn't been looking at very much. What we knew was that paper had been invented in China and we knew that paper had been made in Europe from the late Middle Ages but we didn't realise no one had really studied what happened in between. So, what I did was I started looking at what happened to paper between its invention in China and its introduction into Europe and use for printing. That's how I got interested.

SHEILA BLAIR
And I work particularly on what's written on that paper. My expertise is the history of calligraphy and writing and what I had never realised until Jonathan started working on the paper support is how much the quality and the size of the paper changes what you can write on it and how quickly you can write and therefore what you write down.

ANDI HORVATH
Okay. Let's go back before paper. We had papyrus, which is a reed?

JONATHAN BLOOM
Right. The word papyrus is used both for the reed and for the material made from the reed. A lot of our confusion about paper and the history of paper comes from the fact that we use the same word for all these things and our word paper actually comes from the word for papyrus. However, the material paper doesn't come from papyrus, which is entirely different kind of writing material.

What you did was you took the reed and you cut it into lengths - it was fresh and green - and then you sliced into strips like with a vegetable peeler or something, or a very sharp knife, and then you laid the strips on a smooth surface at right angles to each other. Then you pressed it and the sap still in the reed, gummed it all together and made a sheet. Then you pasted these sheets together to make a scroll and then you could write on that.

ANDI HORVATH
If we weren't using papyrus, we were using parchment.

SHEILA BLAIR
Right. Which is the skin of various animals, particularly sheep in the parts of the world that we work on but it can also be calfskin. It's defined variously. There are problems. First of all, you have to kill the sheep in order to get the parchment, it's heavy, but you can make it anywhere, and that's different from papyrus that comes only from Egypt. Egypt had a monopoly and if you wanted to write on papyrus, which you can only do on a scroll, you were stuck.

ANDI HORVATH
Now, who was writing? Surely some people were drawing on it first, weren't they?

SHEILA BLAIR
Well, people were writing all the way back to the ancient Egyptians and the ancient Persians and in China as well, so there's a long history of writing. The problem with all of these materials before paper is that they're hard to move around, they're heavy or they're expensive and also you can't make a book in the sense of a codex that we have that opens. Have you ever tried to tell anyone turn to page 22 of a papyrus scroll? Yeah, you're unrolling, unrolling, unrolling, so they are not very good for the learning purposes.

ANDI HORVATH
Yeah. You couldn't do it with a clay tablet either; you'd be flipping clay tablet.

SHEILA BLAIR
Yep. No. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

ANDI HORVATH
But I do love the fact that they wrote on clay tablets and today we still write on tablets except they're digital.

SHEILA BLAIR
Right. With a stylus.

JONATHAN BLOOM
We also have - they've found these little books that are notebooks basically, which are made of very thin sheets of wood with a hollow in the middle of them and you filled the hollow with wax and then you would write with a stylus, a sharp instrument, on it. So, if you were let's say composing poetry or your shopping list or something, you would write with the stylus on the wax tablet. It would last long enough for you to remember or to copy it onto something more permanent and then you just used the blunt end of the stylus to smooth it out. It's sort of like your original PalmPilot or something.

ANDI HORVATH
Wow, nothing's changed since ancient times, in some ways.

JONATHAN BLOOM
Right, right.

ANDI HORVATH
Now, what happened between China inventing paper from wood pulp, is that right, and linen?

JONATHAN BLOOM
No, no, no. From vegetable fibres or from the - the Chinese used the inner bark of various shrubs that they would cook up and beat up and make into fibre. What happened after that was the Chinese, particularly Chinese Buddhists, took paper from south-eastern China where it had been invented and brought it to other parts of their world. As they were looking to collect Buddhist texts, they moved towards India, so they went around the Himalayas through Central Asia and then down into India, spreading paper with them. Then when they got these texts they would then take them to Japan, to Korea, to Vietnam, so paper was spread throughout East Asia because of Buddhism.

SHEILA BLAIR
The reason that Jonathan knows so much about how paper is made is because he actually made it, and this was thanks to me. Because our son came in fifth grade and said I need a science project, mom, and I was immensely involved writing my book on calligraphy and didn't want to get involved so I said go to your father and ask him if he can make some paper. Jonathan, explain how you did it.

JONATHAN BLOOM
Well, it was our son's project so we had to choose materials to make it with. So, we went and we used old paper egg cartons, we used old newspaper. We used reeds from the garden. We used…

SHEILA BLAIR
Lint from the dryer.

JONATHAN BLOOM
…lint from the dryer, complete with dog hair, and we ground it all up in a blender, these things in a blender. The garden reeds had to be cooked first. They made terrible paper, because it took far more work than we were able to do. I wouldn't recommend using a very good blender.

SHEILA BLAIR
We bought a special one just for this because I looked in the kitchen and said no [laughs].

ANDI HORVATH
Fair enough.

JONATHAN BLOOM
Right. Then I made a screen the size of a little picture frame that had wired netting, wire screening on it and then we dipped it in a vat full of this pulp and made it and then we compared all the different papers that we made. It was a great success. I think he won the science fair project.

SHEILA BLAIR
He did.

JONATHAN BLOOM
He did it all, of course.

ANDI HORVATH
He had expert help, though.

JONATHAN BLOOM
Right. Advice.

ANDI HORVATH
Now, tell us about the gap between China and Europe. It took almost two millennia to get there, from what I read in your book.

JONATHAN BLOOM
It's a little bit less than that but what happened was the Chinese had taken paper to Central Asia. In Central Asia, which is very, very dry, when the Buddhists there wanted to make paper they didn't have all these plants, these semi-tropical plants that you had in China and so they learned that you could make paper from other materials such as waste fibres like cotton or linen rags or various other plants, flax or hemp, whatever they had. This was a major achievement.

The Muslims in the late 7th and early 8th century encountered this culture of paper, which had been used not only for religious purposes but we have letters that merchants sent or government documents and stuff. The Muslims at this point had this - just were beginning this enormous empire that stretched from Central Asia to the Atlantic Ocean and they desperately needed material on which to write down who owed what, who was due what for government purposes, taxation, whatever.

SHEILA BLAIR
Because there are certain advantages that paper has over parchment. Parchment, surprisingly enough, is easy to change. You can get out your little knife and cut away the 10, if your tax rate is 10 percent and change it to five.

ANDI HORVATH
So you can Photoshop it?

SHEILA BLAIR
Yeah. Whereas paper traditionally that's unsized, or even sized paper, the ink soaks in and you can't change the numbers. Paper is also much lighter, so if you're sending out tax rolls, tax documents from Baghdad all the way to Spain or Central Asia, much easier on a paper document and you can make paper pretty much anywhere that you have flowing water. You don't need a flock of sheep, you don't have to kill them, you don't have to eat all that kebab afterwards because you've just done in your entire sheep population.

ANDI HORVATH
Got it.

JONATHAN BLOOM
We know for example that by the late 700s paper was being made in Baghdad in Iraq and by 800 we know it's made in Syria and by 850 in Egypt and then by 950 all the way to Morocco and by 1000 it's in Spain, which is - I think I calculated it's something like 300 miles a year, just over the course of two centuries or something, which is absolutely extraordinary for - which shows just how important this new material was.

ANDI HORVATH
Now, I get it that it's so important because if we think of our mobile phones, it's our outsourced brain, right. I don't need to remember phone numbers. Back then paper must have been the outsourced brain. You couldn't remember all your tax interactions or costing or accounting; now you had a medium.

SHEILA BLAIR
Well, and also for literature. This is the first time we start writing down as opposed to the oral tradition of passing on. You get more uniform versions of things whereas before, things like the Iliad in the classic tradition or the Shahnameh in the Persian tradition could grow or shrink depending on who was reciting them and whether they needed to expand or couldn't remember or needed mnemonic devices and suddenly you start getting more codified versions.

You start getting literary, you start getting books written down, but it's much slower for Muslims to adapt, or adopt paper for writing down the Quran, God's word revealed to the Prophet Mohammed, because of religious restrictions. So, Quran manuscripts continue on parchment much longer than other literary traditions which soon adopt paper.

ANDI HORVATH
Surely there was a co-evolution of what you wrote with as well on paper.

JONATHAN BLOOM
Absolutely. We think of ink as one kind of thing but in Arabic there are actually two different words for ink, one for the kind of ink that you use on parchment, which is made with metallic salts, and stains the parchment, and the other one, which is carbon black, like lamp black or something, you know, soot, which you use on paper. You could - they also used it on papyrus.

What's interesting is you can see in old documents, you can see that this shift wasn't always understood because sometimes people used the metallic type of ink on paper and it ate through the paper and so you see little holes where the writing is, whereas the carbon wouldn't eat through it, but it didn't work on parchment because it just stayed on the surface and could be easily scraped off.

SHEILA BLAIR
Over time, Muslims also learned how to make better and better paper, so paper which had been quite brown in the early period becomes whiter and whiter. It gets bigger and bigger, never bigger than about a metre because you can't pick up the screen evenly; it tilts and then you get an uneven sheet. But when it gets bigger and whiter, this is the period when the Mongols have come in from the east and you get illustrated books, because you've got space to put in beautiful paintings, so you get larger and larger paintings. You can see how the materials change the way that you do literature and also that you do art.

ANDI HORVATH
This is like the equivalent of the late 20th century evolution of Google and Web.2 I suppose, to stretch the metaphor a bit. The information age has started. It's now democratised information.

JONATHAN BLOOM
Right. We have these stories about libraries in the Middle Ages and for example, the library of the ruler of Spain in the late 900s, just before the year 1000, is said to have a library that had 400,000 books in it. Now, this is an old saw that people repeat over and over again, and 400,000 is such a big number and it's a crazy number, and you say okay, maybe it's inflated by a factor of 10. Let's say he only had 40,000 books; that is still 10 times more books than the largest library in Europe had at that time. The reason is of course because of paper and the culture of paper; that is, in Europe at that point they were still copying books on parchment whereas in the Muslim world they were copying them on paper. There was also a…

SHEILA BLAIR
I would just say copying is the key word there because they were copying one-to-one on parchment. You had a book, you had it next to you and you literally copied it. Whereas the Muslims had a different system of oral transmission where the teacher got up and dictated; all the students wrote it down. Afterwards they brought up their books and he gives them an A, yes, okay, and then they are allowed to go home and dictate the book to 10 of their students. The difference would be an arithmetic versus a geometric progression and all of us who remember from our math classes, the difference in…

ANDI HORVATH
It's compound interest.

SHEILA BLAIR
You got it [laughs].

JONATHAN BLOOM
So you see there are these stories in mediaeval texts about how the caliph said oh, do we have any books by so-and-so and the librarian comes out and says yes, sire, and he brings out 100 copies of a book. It's because of this system of multiplication of texts, which meant that this was a much more - it doesn't mean that everybody knew how to read and write but it made mediaeval Islamic society much more literate and conscious of the written word than contemporary societies elsewhere.

SHEILA BLAIR
It also in terms of art requires some shifting from the way we think because Arabic and all other languages that are written in Arabic scripts go from right to left. We constantly think of looking at something - even if we don't know it, when we walk into a room we go from left to right and you have to overrule that when you're looking at most of the things that we look at in the lands where Islam was the major religion.

ANDI HORVATH
This is a very exciting story of how the first information age began. Did you end up answering your question which you first set out to explore, which was how did the architects share their skills and trade information?

JONATHAN BLOOM
Well, I think it happened slowly, because building and the arts were not particularly prestigious in the Muslim world. The only art that really was considered…

SHEILA BLAIR
Art.

JONATHAN BLOOM
…art was calligraphy. So, the access to paper was initially restricted - it was limited. It was initially expensive; you couldn't just use it and throw it away, but as it became more and more common, more and more people used it and so you can see, if you look really carefully at different kinds of arts, how they shifted from artists or artistically-inclined people started shifting from one medium to another.

For example, in the 12th century in Iran you'll have this incredible fluorescence of beautiful painting on ceramics. Then in the 14th century, the period that Sheila was just talking about, that you have this incredible painting on paper. What happens is the ceramics are oh, okay, and you get the - the feeling is that if Ahmed was a really good artist in one century, he would have gone into pottery and decorating pottery but in the following century, it was going to be you paint on paper.

ANDI HORVATH
And paper is transportable.

JONATHAN BLOOM
Right, so ideas could move very quickly from one place to another. But making drawings, making plans is encoding information and I think this is a whole development that we don't really have the evidence for except in the buildings that survive, and so we have to look into them and try and see - it's not only that someone sat there and drew a plan but you had to have people who could understand how to read it too and decode the information.

SHEILA BLAIR
The same thing, we don't know with all these wonderful illustrated books, who used them? They were made mostly for the court. They were expensive. Did they actually read them or were they prestige gifts to give away or hold them up and say look, I have this wonderful copy. So, we tend to look at the pictures but maybe other people there were looking much more at the words.

There is also a shift by the time you get to the 15th, 16th and particularly 17th centuries that you can establish a dynastic style because you can work out a particular plant motif or a flower on paper and you can then hand it to your ceramicist and say paint me a lot of ceramics that look like that. You can hand it to someone in the textile world and say make me textiles that have that design on it. You can send it out across your empire and all your mosques in the Ottoman Empire can have minarets that look more or less the same - not quite the same but more or less - and you can have a style and you can mark your territory with that style.

ANDI HORVATH
When was the heyday of paper? I had a go at trying to imagine this; I thought maybe it was about 1996 where we weren't quite in the digital era. I remember standing at a photocopier photocopying lecture notes. When, according to you, was the heyday?

JONATHAN BLOOM
If you look at the statistics, I think we're using as much paper today as we've ever used.

ANDI HORVATH
So we've not moved towards the paperless office at all?

JONATHAN BLOOM
Well, no - I remember - there's actually a book I think called The Myth of the Paperless Office, which is - and the argument is I think that paper has certain affordances, that is that it allows us to do things in certain ways that are very good and very useful. That's not to say that the smartphone isn't useful but it's often easier to jot something down on a piece of paper than it is to pull out your phone and then start typing away on it.

SHEILA BLAIR
In terms of art also it's much easier to doodle or sketch on a piece of paper and now you see even architects are presenting to museums, oh, the sketch of this building I made over lunch on a paper napkin, and that's become part of the archive of the artist.

ANDI HORVATH
Because we are much more conscious about our paper usage and recycling it.

JONATHAN BLOOM
Right.

ANDI HORVATH
I read somewhere I think in your book that someone quoted the amount of paper that was being used per day was something huge. It just destroyed my brain cells when I thought about it.

JONATHAN BLOOM
Right, right. I sat around one time calculating how much office paper was used and it would cover the United States several times over or something, you know what I mean.

ANDI HORVATH
Yeah.

JONATHAN BLOOM
We use it in different ways. I think clearly there are fewer newspapers being printed because we can get our news in other forms, but we both find that when we get an article digitally we often want to print it out because it's so much easier to read as a - or many books are easier to read.

SHEILA BLAIR
And to flip back and forth. No matter how much they say just push on this button and you'll go to the footnote or something, sometimes you want to have them actually open right next to each other, which you can do with at least three or four fingers. I get a little irritated when there are 10 things you're supposed to be holding on, the note, the illustration, the index, the bibliographic reference, you feel like you are Shiva with seven arms, but that's harder. There have actually been studies done saying you learn material in different ways if you're listening to things on tape or if you're reading them in a book, or if you're reading them on your tablet.

ANDI HORVATH
What surprises have you had in your research that really shook your world?

JONATHAN BLOOM
Well, when I was working on the history of paper in the Muslim world, I saw that it first was used by merchants and government and commerce and such and then it moved on to literature and then the arts, the visual arts and stuff, and encouraged new approaches to notation of various forms, whether it's notation of artistic ideas or architecture or music or whatever. Then because I had to write a last chapter for the book. I wrote about what happened in Europe and I was curious about what happened in Europe, and of course, I couldn't do too much, but what I always thought was it would be really fun to write a book about paper after print.

The thing is that in Europe printing has always taken over the whole subject and what I've learned, and just slightly as from colleagues who are working on early documents on paper, is that there's a whole world of paper before printing in Europe where Europeans had this material but they didn't use it for the fancy religious books like [just as in the Muslim World] but they used it for correspondence, they used it for commercial documents, they used it for ledgers, for land - deeds dealing with land tenure and stuff.

For example, there's a merchant in Prato, in the Italian city of Prato from the 13th century, I believe, maybe 14th century, Marco Datini, and he left his house stuffed with documents. In the 19th century it was opened, and there are hundreds of thousands of paper documents there which include letters to his wife, et cetera. What these documents and others like it show is that the availability of paper in Europe allowed new groups of people to start writing - so women, for example, started writing. People wrote - kept books of bits of poetry, they kept these commonplace books where they would write down things. This is not the kind of stuff that gets collected in libraries, particularly, because they're not…

SHEILA BLAIR
Or museums.

JONATHAN BLOOM
Or museums. They're not great works of art, and so they've been destroyed over the ages but occasionally you find these things and you realise that paper probably had the same effect in Europe that it had had in the Muslim world.

ANDI HORVATH
Sheila?

SHEILA BLAIR
My great, great a-ha moment with paper was when I was a second-year graduate student and I was taking this seminar on a manuscript, the so-called Great Mongol Shahnameh, which had been cut up and the paintings, illustrated pages sold to 58 museums. It was a great topic. Some people worked on the Chinese sources, some people worked on European sources; I said I'll work on the text because I like languages and texts. I suddenly realised that one page in Cleveland and another page in New York had on their back sides, the unillustrated sides, contiguous text, and so did a third page in another museum.

I said well, you can't have a book that has contiguous texts in three different museums; what is going on here? I suddenly, in my a-ha moment, realised that a dealer, George Demotte in the early 20th century, who was selling the manuscript couldn't sell it as a whole and so he took the pages and he actually what we call delaminated them or pulled them apart, front to back, slapped on another something on the back side and then he could maximise his profits and sell an illustrated page. Up until that point, no one realised that you could actually delaminate 14th century paper, probably because it's so highly burnished.

Paper curators then told me oh no, this is a trick, people do it with dollar bills, it's something you learn when you're a paper curator, there are ways to do it and now that I know there are things to look at like big holes in a painting that's in one museum and corresponding holes in a painting that's in another museum, i.e. they were together at one point and damaged a bit when they were pulled apart. Since then, we've realised that there are lots and lots of manuscripts that this happened to and lots and lots of paintings.

One of the reasons people never realised this before is when museums used to display their pages of manuscripts, they cut out a mat and they just had a little box to show you the painting and they cut off all the text that went around it. What I've learned also is you have to look at the whole page and you have to imagine what it looked like in a book with a facing page. It's quite a different way of looking at this rather than just seeing a little box with a painting in it on your screen.

ANDI HORVATH
You've got context.

SHEILA BLAIR
Yeah, yeah.

ANDI HORVATH
You've got juxtapositions.

SHEILA BLAIR
And then you have in codices different ways that people signalled that the painting was coming up. Because you want to often have the painting in the middle of the page and you want to have the right line of text above it that says "Ruston picked up his bow and shot Isfandiyar" - and then there's a picture - you have to somehow juggle the text. One of the ways they did it with poetry was to start writing some of the lines diagonally so it stretched out the text, but also if you're thinking of a codex and you're turning the pages you're reading, you're getting this little clue like 'illustration coming up, get ready'. So there's a visual key to reading this text.

ANDI HORVATH
Yeah, there's a key. Almost giving instruction to the reader.

SHEILA BLAIR
And like when you're reading to your kids at night, getting them to almost the end of story [laughs].

ANDI HORVATH
Got it. So next time we're picking up a blank sheet of paper, we're about to write a note on it but we've stopped to marvel at the piece of paper, what would you like us to think about?

JONATHAN BLOOM
Well, I'd say that that piece of paper came from a bundle of paper, right. It was - you bought it in a bundle, and what's that bundle called? A ream. The word ream actually comes from the Spanish risma, which actually comes from the Arabic word for bundle. It is the only bit of evidence for this long story of the Arab role in the history of paper that survives in the English language today.

SHEILA BLAIR
I would say look at those lines on the old pads of paper we used to get, those light blue lines. That's not the only way you can make lines. Traditionally, what Muslims did was put the piece of paper on a stringboard, press it over the board and you get little indentations and look closely, but that's how you can write such uniform straight lines if you're making a manuscript.

ANDI HORVATH
Fascinating. The history of paper. Thank you, Professor Jonathan Bloom and thank you, Professor Sheila Blair.

SHEILA BLAIR
You're welcome.

JONATHAN BLOOM
You're most welcome.

CHRIS HATZIS
Thank you to Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair, Norma Jean Calderwood University Professors of Islamic and Asian Art at Boston College and Hamid Bin Khalifa Endowed Chairs of Islamic Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. And thanks to our reporter Dr Andi Horvath.

Eavesdrop on Experts - stories of inspiration and insights - was made possible by the University of Melbourne. This episode was recorded on March 12, 2019. You’ll find a full transcript on the Pursuit website. Audio engineering by me, Chris Hatzis. Co-production - Silvi Vann-Wall and Dr Andi Horvath. Eavesdrop on Experts is licensed under Creative Commons, Copyright 2019, The University of Melbourne. Drop us a review on iTunes and check out the rest of the Eavesdrop episodes in our archive. I’m Chris Hatzis, producer and editor. Join us again next time for another Eavesdrop on Experts.