Tearing up Trump’s State of the Union address and throwing it in the trash, Nancy Pelosi managed to convey many things. But one of them was an object lesson in what scholars like to call the “affordances” of paper. We may have taken it for granted, but paper can be put to any number of uses and misuses: it’s a medium but also a prop; it can hold your groceries or wipe your behind. You can cut it, tear it, crumple it, or, indeed, rip it in half with barely controlled fury. Try doing that with an iPad.
It is not a fresh insight that the text is a material artifact, of course, nor that the physical book has shaped the way we read and write. But we’re starting to see how much else paper has shaped—perceiving not just the multifarious things we have done with it but that it has done with us. Paper, we realize, was never simply a writing surface but a complicated substance that folded itself into the fabric of culture and consciousness. And against the backlit glow of the screen, it is emerging in all its strangeness as a compelling object of study.
Paper—both how it came to be and what it meant to readers in past eras—is the focus of—so far—not one but two monographs in 2020: Jonathan Senchyne’s The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Joshua Calhoun’s The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England.
Paper is definitely a thing right now. But, as these intersecting accounts show vividly, it always has been. Both books demonstrate how an awareness of paper’s “thingliness” once permeated literary culture and the popular imagination.
Senchyne’s and Calhoun’s books contribute to what is a growing field: Lisa Gitelman’s Paper Knowledge, Ben Kafka’s The Demon of Writing: The Powers and Failures of Paperwork, and Bonnie Mak’s How the Page Matters have begun to explore how paper has been used, thought, and experienced. But Senchyne and Calhoun signal a new phase of investigation. Together, their books focus on the granular, even molecular, dimensions of paper. In fact, these are not books about paper per se but about its specific historical form—rag paper.
Only in the 1870s was wood pulp introduced as a raw material. In the centuries before this, paper was a different artifact, made of cotton and linen rags. And in these texts, rag paper is subjected to almost forensic scrutiny: its textures are pored over, its fibers picked apart, and—in Calhoun’s case—its chemical makeup investigated. Such interdisciplinary bibliographical methods are usually harnessed to empirical investigation. Today, for example, there is a whole field dedicated to scrutinizing the book as organic matter; biocodicologists now roam the archives, subjecting the written surface to multispectral analysis to reveal hidden markings and even DNA.