Bookmaking and the idea of paper

(I promise: this is interesting!)

Photo by Brandi Redd on Unsplash

I am in a book group with my friends Lynn Mayo and Frank Sciacca; we read a couple of books over the summer. We’ve been meeting for many years now. We started by reading Proust, but Frank thought it was boring and overrated. (“The French!” he said, dismissively. “Their food isn’t that good either.”). We read several academic novels (we all work—or in Frank’s case, worked) at Hamilton College, so these spoke to us in a way that they might not speak to people who aren’t at colleges. We spent a summer reading The Odyssey and the Iliad; another summer reading Nabokov. We usually meet in the college library, and spend a few minutes gossiping before we start talking about the book.

Frank writes in his books—if they’re library books, he writes in pencil and erases all his comments before he returns the book. But the book we’re reading now, about bookmaking , has a couple of chapters about marginalia. The author, Adam Smyth, has a lot of praise for marginalia. It is, he says, a way of carrying on a conversation with a book, and it also gives historians evidence of the hands through which a book has passed, or the parts of the book that have been read by lots of people (as opposed to the parts that have been ignored.). We have had many discussions about the ethics of writing in books, and we are still undecided about whether Frank ought to leave his comments in this particular library book. I’m voting for him to leave them.

This week, we’ve been reading about paper, and as interesting as the marginalia chapters were, the paper chapter surpasses it. Smyth is eager to debunk the story—which many of us learned when we learned about the Gutenberg press and the spread of literacy—that the development of paper was part of a plan to make reading more democratic. No longer would book production require the slaughter of thousands of animals; no longer would books be scarce and expensive, the story goes. Paper (along with the printing press) allowed books to be mass produced, and widely read. But Smyth thinks that this story smells as bad as the paper mills that were born of this revolution.

The virtues of paper, Smyth argues, are mostly about the virtue of machines. Smyth cites an image of a paper mill which inspired one of Europe’s 19th century papermakers: it is almost empty except for a few pacific workers and some machines. The mechanical process of paper manufacturing, Smyth argues, meant that workers could be eliminated, with their messiness and their issues.

The other idea that Smyth is eager to debunk is the idea that a piece of paper is blank. Behind each piece of paper is a team of workers, machines, and ideas. The idea that the mind is, as the empiricists thought, like a blank piece of paper upon which experience writes assumes that a piece of paper with no writing on it is empty—that there is nothing there. But there is plenty there, Smyth argues, if we think about how a piece of paper comes into being.