Items related to On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History...
On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History (ALA Notable Books for Adults) - Hardcover
Synopsis
A Best Book of the Year: Mother Jones, Bloomberg News, National Post,Kirkus Reviews
A consideration of all things paper—its invention that revolutionized human civilization; its thousand-fold uses (and misuses), proliferation, and sweeping influence on society; its makers, shapers, collectors, and pulpers—written by the admired cultural historian and author of the trilogy on all things book-related: A Gentle Madness; Patience and Fortitude (“How could any intelligent, literate person not just love this book?”—Simon Winchester); andA Splendor of Letters (“Elegant, wry, and humane”—André Bernard, New York Observer).
Nicholas Basbanes writes about paper, from its invention in China two thousand years ago to its ideal means, recording the thoughts of Islamic scholars and mathematicians that made the Middle East a center of intellectual energy; from Europe, by way of Spain in the twelfth century and Italy in the thirteenth at the time of the Renaissance, to North America and the rest of the inhabited world.
Basbanes writes about the ways in which paper has been used to record history, make laws, conduct business, and establish identities . . . He makes clear that without paper, modern hygienic practice would be unimaginable; that as currency, people will do almost anything to possess it . . . that the Industrial Revolution would never have happened without paper on which to draw designs and blueprints.
We see paper’s crucial role in the unfolding of historical events, political scandals, and sensational trials: how the American Revolution which took shape with the Battle of Lexington and Concord, began with the Stamp Act of 1765 . . . the Dreyfus Affair and the forged memorandum known as “the bordereau” . . . America’s entry into World War I with the Zimmerman Telegram . . . the Alger Hiss spy case and Whittaker Chambers’s testimony involving the notorious Pumpkin Papers . . . Daniel Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 and the scandal of Watergate.
Basbanes writes of his travels to get to the source of the story—to China, along the Burma Road, and to Japan, whose handmade paper, washi, is as much an expression of the human spirit as it is of craftsmanship . . . to Landover, Maryland, home of the National Security Agency and its one hundred million ultra secret documents, pulped by cryptologists and sent to be recycled as pizza boxes and egg cartons . . . to the Crane Paper mill of Dalton, Massachusetts, a seventh-generation family-owned enterprise, the exclusive supplier of paper for American currency since 1879 . . . and to the Kimberly-Clark mill in New Milford, Connecticut, manufacturer daily of one million boxes of Kleenex tissue and as many rolls of Scott kitchen towels.
Entertaining, illuminating, irresistible, a book that masterfully guides us through paper’s inseparability from human culture . . .
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
Nicholas A. Basbanes is an award-winning investigative journalist and was literary editor of theWorcester Sunday Telegram. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, theLos Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and Smithsonian, and he is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. Basbanes lives in North Grafton, Massachusetts, with his wife.
From the Back Cover
A consideration of all things paper-its invention that revolutionized human civilization; its thousand-fold uses (and misuses), proliferation, and sweeping influence on society; its makers, shapers, collectors, and pulpers-written by the admired cultural historian and author of the trilogy on all things book-related: A Gentle Madness; Patience and Fortitude ("How could any intelligent, literate person not just love this book?"-Simon Winchester); and A Splendor of Letters ("Elegant, wry, and humane"-André Bernard, New York Observer).
Nicholas Basbanes writes about paper, from its invention in China two thousand years ago to its ideal means, recording the thoughts of Islamic scholars and mathematicians that made the Middle East a center of intellectual energy; from Europe, by way of Spain in the twelfth century and Italy in the thirteenth at the time of the Renaissance, to North America and the rest of the inhabited world.
Basbanes writes about the ways in which paper has been used to record history, make laws, conduct business, and establish identities . . . He makes clear that without paper, modern hygienic practice would be unimaginable; that as currency, people will do almost anything to possess it . . . that the Industrial Revolution would never have happened without paper on which to draw designs and blueprints.
We see paper's crucial role in the unfolding of historical events, political scandals, and sensational trials: how the American Revolution which took shape with the Battle of Lexington and Concord, began with the Stamp Act of 1765 . . . the Dreyfus Affair and the forged memorandum known as "the bordereau" . . . America's entry into World War I with the Zimmerman Telegram . . . the Alger Hiss spy case and Whittaker Chambers's testimony involving the notorious Pumpkin Papers . . . Daniel Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 and the scandal of Watergate.
Basbanes writes of his travels to get to the source of the story-to China, along the Burma Road, and to Japan, whose handmade paper, washi, is as much an expression of the human spirit as it is of craftsmanship . . . to Landover, Maryland, home of the National Security Agency and its one hundred million ultra secret documents, pulped by cryptologists and sent to be recycled as pizza boxes and egg cartons . . . to the Crane Paper mill of Dalton, Massachusetts, a seventh-generation family-owned enterprise, the exclusive supplier of paper for American currency since 1879 . . . and to the Kimberly-Clark mill in New Milford, Connecticut, manufacturer daily of one million boxes of Kleenex tissue and as many rolls of Scott kitchen towels.
Entertaining, illuminating, irresistible, a book that masterfully guides us through paper's inseparability from human culture . . .
From the Inside Flap
A consideration of all things paper-its invention that revolutionized human civilization; its thousand-fold uses (and misuses), proliferation, and sweeping influence on society; its makers, shapers, collectors, and pulpers-written by the admired cultural historian and author of the trilogy on all things book-related: A Gentle Madness; Patience and Fortitude ("How could any intelligent, literate person not just love this book?"-Simon Winchester); and A Splendor of Letters ("Elegant, wry, and humane"-André Bernard, New York Observer).
Nicholas Basbanes writes about paper, from its invention in China two thousand years ago to its ideal means, recording the thoughts of Islamic scholars and mathematicians that made the Middle East a center of intellectual energy; from Europe, by way of Spain in the twelfth century and Italy in the thirteenth at the time of the Renaissance, to North America and the rest of the inhabited world.
Basbanes writes about the ways in which paper has been used to record history, make laws, conduct business, and establish identities . . . He makes clear that without paper, modern hygienic practice would be unimaginable; that as currency, people will do almost anything to possess it . . . that the Industrial Revolution would never have happened without paper on which to draw designs and blueprints.
We see paper's crucial role in the unfolding of historical events, political scandals, and sensational trials: how the American Revolution which took shape with the Battle of Lexington and Concord, began with the Stamp Act of 1765 . . . the Dreyfus Affair and the forged memorandum known as "the bordereau" . . . America's entry into World War I with the Zimmerman Telegram . . . the Alger Hiss spy case and Whittaker Chambers's testimony involving the notorious Pumpkin Papers . . . Daniel Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 and the scandal of Watergate.
Basbanes writes of his travels to get to the source of the story-to China, along the Burma Road, and to Japan, whose handmade paper, washi, is as much an expression of the human spirit as it is of craftsmanship . . . to Landover, Maryland, home of the National Security Agency and its one hundred million ultra secret documents, pulped by cryptologists and sent to be recycled as pizza boxes and egg cartons . . . to the Crane Paper mill of Dalton, Massachusetts, a seventh-generation family-owned enterprise, the exclusive supplier of paper for American currency since 1879 . . . and to the Kimberly-Clark mill in New Milford, Connecticut, manufacturer daily of one million boxes of Kleenex tissue and as many rolls of Scott kitchen towels.
Entertaining, illuminating, irresistible, a book that masterfully guides us through paper's inseparability from human culture . . .
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
On Paper
The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History
By Nicholas A. BasbanesRandom House LLC
Copyright © 2013 Nicholas A. Basbanes
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-307-26642-2All rights reserved.
PREFACE
As a writer of nonfiction, I have devoted a good deal of my life to the study ofbooks in every conceivable context, so a work now on the stuff of transmissionitself should come as no surprise to anyone. But in the end, these venerablecontainers of shared wisdom were merely the launching pad for what became a farwider and much deeper adventure of inquiry, one that still has me turning upstories and ideas that in a world without limits would demand inclusion in thesepages—it is that compelling a subject.
Beyond paper's obvious utility as a writing surface, its invention in Chinaduring the early years of the modern era made possible the introduction ofprinting, with the first known devices being stamps made from carved woodenblocks, a process known today as xylography (literally, writing with wood). Notlong after the Arab world learned to make paper from the Chinese in the eighthcentury, the Middle East became a center of intellectual energy, with paperproviding the ideal means of recording the thoughts and calculations of Islamicscholars and mathematicians. Making its first toehold in Europe by way ofSpain late in the eleventh century, the process moved in the thirteenth toItaly, which became, at about the same time, the cradle of what in later yearswould be known as the Renaissance. From Europe it made its way to North Americaand the rest of the inhabited world.
The inexorable spread of this versatile material has been told in bits andpieces by a number of paper specialists whose works are thoroughly referenced inmy bibliography. While I am certainly mindful of the chronological sweep of thisubiquitous product, a conventional timeline of its discovery and adoption is notthe central thrust of this book, even though one of the goals of Part I isnonetheless to provide a selective overview of its glorious history.
Instead, my driving interest points more to the idea of paper, one thatcertainly takes in the twin notions of medium and message but that also examinesits indispensability as a tool of flexibility and function. The laser physicistand master origami folder Robert Lang, whom you will meet in Chapter 15, livesby the credo that "anything is possible in origami," which can pretty much besaid about paper itself. Paper is light, absorbent, strong, plentiful, andportable; you can fold it, mail it, coat it with wax and waterproof it, wrapgunpowder or tobacco in it, boil tea in it. We have used paper in abundance torecord our history, make our laws, conduct our business, correspond with ourloved ones, decorate our walls, and establish our identities.
When it comes to pure utility, modern hygienic practice is unimaginable withoutpaper; when used as currency, people will move heaven and earth to possess it.In realms of the intellect, every manner of scientific inquiry begins as anonverbal spark in the mind, and more often than not that first burst ofperception is visualized more fully on a sheet of paper. When it's usedas an instrument of the generative process, innovators of every persuasion cansketch and tinker away on it at will, design buildings and machines on it,compose music and create poetry on it. As a "paper revolution" swept throughEurope in the eighteenth century, architects and engineers transformed themanner and the means of the living landscape. The Industrial Revolution inparticular is hard to conceive of without its precisely reproduced instructionsheets to guide assembly crews in their various assignments.
The word virtual has become, in the computer age, one way of describing asimulated reality that exists quite apart from the concrete world, analternative existence that is not just a copy but a substitute for the realthing. In the expression of imagery, there is nothing at all new about theconcept; people have endeavored to create likenesses of themselves and theirsurroundings for millennia, with examples to be found in cave paintings preparedthousands of years ago, during the last ice age, many of them impressive to thisday for their artistry and execution. By no means unique in this regard, paperhas nonetheless been around for centuries, nobly fulfilling that function.
When the seventeenth-century patron of the arts Cassiano dal Pozzo set out toassemble a comprehensive collection of visual knowledge, he commissioned anumber of prominent artists to make what turned out to be seven thousandwatercolors, drawings, and prints in fields that included botany, art,architecture, geology, zoology, and ornithology. Dispersed today amongfour major institutional collections, what was arguably the world's firstvirtual library is known now as the Paper Museum. In more recent times,lithography and photography—the words literally mean "writing with stone"and "writing with light"— used paper as the surface of choice to createand distribute surrogate images.
As a force in shaping historical events, paper rarely draws attention to itself,yet its role is evident to varying degrees in scenario after scenario. Onetelling case in point is the introduction of human flight during the eighteenthcentury in France, when the Montgolfier brothers used several layers of papermade in the family mill to line the inner skin of the world's first hot-airballoon. Another example is the American Revolution; historians generally agreethat the run-up to the Battles of Lexington and Concord can be said to havebegun with the Stamp Act of 1765, which was all about taxing the many wayscolonists had come to rely on paper documents in their daily lives. A centurylater, the refusal of Hindu and Muslim mercenary soldiers in theemploy of the British East India Company to bite open paper cartridges greasedwith animal fat sparked a bloody insurrection known variously today as the SepoyMutiny and the First War of Indian Independence.
A roll call of political scandals, international incidents, and sensationaltrials to have paper documents at some point play a crucial role in theunfolding of events would have to include the Dreyfus affair of the 1890s andearly 1900s, involving a forged memorandum known as the bordereau; America'sentry into World War I, with the Zimmermann Telegram; the Alger Hiss spycase of the late 1940s, which involved the damning testimony of WhittakerChambers regarding the notorious Pumpkin Papers; the trial of Julius and EthelRosenberg in 1953, with its purloined sketch of a nuclear implosion device thatwas crucial in sending both off to the electric chair; and Watergate,precipitated by Daniel Ellsberg's brazen release in 1971 of thePentagon Papers. And while the influence of computers is everywhere apparent, itis instructive to note that the earliest machines of any functional significanceprocessed their data on punched paper cards, and that the progenitor of allelectronic printing devices—the universal stock ticker—used narrowspools of newsprint to give real-time readouts of financial transactions,revolutionizing forever the way business would be conducted on Wall Street.
Not only are we awash in a world of paper; we are awash in a world of paperclichés. George W. Bush defeated Al Gore in 2000 by a "paper thin" margin, thedeceit that surrounded the Enron fiasco was built on a "tissue of lies," and thefragile structure that subsequently collapsed was a "house of cards." To beatsomeone to a "pulp" is to inflict appalling injury. To "mapout" a plan for something is to come up with a specific course of action. Day inand day out, we are mired in "red tape," a corollary of being "buried under amountain of paper," while a "paper tiger" is either a wimp or a weakling or afraud, take your pick. I readily admit to playing with a few of them in thisbook—something being "not worth the paper it is printed on" wasirresistible, and it provided the premise for the chapter I call "Face Value."
At the very time I was completing the first draft of this manuscript, the BostonRed Sox—a team I have been following obsessively since my father took meto Fenway Park for the first time in 1953—finished the most spectacularflop in the history of Major League Baseball, squandering a seeminglyinsurmountable lead of nine games with less than a month to go in the 2011season and finishing entirely out of the playoffs. Making their collapse doublypainful were predictions made at the start of the season that, with fifteen highly paidAll-Stars in the lineup, Boston was by far the best team to take the field thatyear. Sports Illustrated had picked the Red Sox to win one hundred games andhandily dispatch the San Francisco Giants in the World Series; even seasonedsportswriters in New York, home of the archrival Yankees, were impressed bytheir prospects for a championship.
"I can see why people are talking about our going back to the World Series," oneof those highly paid Red Sox, J. D. Drew, had told Dan Shaughnessy, theestimable baseball columnist for the Boston Globe, as opening day drew near inApril. "On paper, we have that kind of team." It was that blasé comment ofpresumed inevitability—all of it worked out abstractly on an imaginarynotation pad—that gave Shaughnessy reason to pause and commentforebodingly, with uncanny prescience, "But it never plays out the way it doeson paper, does it?"
At a meeting in Hanoi in June 2012, American secretary of defense Leon Panettapresented to Vietnamese minister of national defense Phung Quang Thanh a smallmaroon diary taken from a fallen North Vietnamese soldier by a U.S. Marine in1966. In return, Thanh turned over to Panetta a passel of personal lettersremoved from the body of Army sergeant Steve Flaherty of the 101st AirborneDivision after he was killed in action in 1969. The Washington Post summed upthe arti-fact exchange by noting that these two relics, from a time when the twocountries "were bitter enemies," had in an instant become "symbols ofthe evolving U.S.-Vietnamese relationship"—and each was recorded onotherwise unremarkable sheets of paper.
My research model for this book has been fairly straightforward, and should beapparent in each chapter. I traveled in China along the Burma Road, because OldChina is where the story begins, and I proceeded in due course to Japan, becausethat was the only place where I could meet with a Living National Treasurepapermaker. I spent seven months trying to get a tour of the National SecurityAgency, in Fort Meade, Maryland, because the cryptologists there pulp onehundred million ultrasecret documents a year (give or take) and send them offfor recycled use as pizza boxes and egg cartons. I spent two days at theCrane Paper mill, in Western Massachusetts, because, as Willie Sutton ispurported to have famously said, "that's where the money is"—or, more tothe point, that is where all the paper for American currency is made. Since theidea of "disposability" is very much a paper theme, too, the same goes for aKimberly-Clark mill in Connecticut, where close to a million boxes ofKleenex tissue, and as many rolls of Scott kitchen towels, are made every day.If there's a common thread to be discerned, it is what Graham Greene sagelycalled, in one of his novels, "the human factor."
A few years ago, the British Association of Paper Historians noted in adescription of its activities that there are something onthe order of twenty thousand commercial uses of paper in the world today, andthat the organization's members are interested in each and every one of them.Rest easy, dear reader: I am not about to explore twenty thousand different usesof paper here. But if that claim is accurate—and one Pennsylvania companyyou will meet in Chapter 17 alone has a line of one thousand different productsfor its output—then the paperless society we hear being bandied about somuch today may not be as imminent as some people suggest. The words of the greatFats Waller seem especially relevant on this point: "One never knows, do one?"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from On Paper by Nicholas A. Basbanes. Copyright © 2013 Nicholas A. Basbanes. Excerpted by permission of Random House LLC, a division of Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
Search results for On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History...
Stock Image
On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History (ALA Notable Books for Adults)
Seller: ThriftBooks-Phoenix, Phoenix, AZ, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. Former library book; May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G0307266427I4N10
Quantity: 1 available
Stock Image
On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History (ALA Notable Books for Adults)
Seller: ThriftBooks-Dallas, Dallas, TX, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Hardcover. Condition: As New. No Jacket. Pages are clean and are not marred by notes or folds of any kind. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G0307266427I2N00
Quantity: 1 available
Stock Image
On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History (ALA Notable Books for Adults)
Seller: ThriftBooks-Reno, Reno, NV, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Hardcover. Condition: Good. No Jacket. Former library book; Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G0307266427I3N10
Quantity: 1 available
Stock Image
On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History (ALA Notable Books for Adults)
Seller: ThriftBooks-Reno, Reno, NV, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. Former library book; May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G0307266427I4N10
Quantity: 1 available
Stock Image
On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History (ALA Notable Books for Adults)
Seller: ThriftBooks-Phoenix, Phoenix, AZ, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Hardcover. Condition: Good. No Jacket. Former library book; Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G0307266427I3N10
Quantity: 1 available
Stock Image
On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History (ALA Notable Books for Adults)
Seller: ThriftBooks-Atlanta, AUSTELL, GA, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Hardcover. Condition: Good. No Jacket. Former library book; Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G0307266427I3N10
Quantity: 1 available
Stock Image
On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History (ALA Notable Books for Adults)
Seller: ThriftBooks-Atlanta, AUSTELL, GA, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. Former library book; May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G0307266427I4N10
Quantity: 1 available
Stock Image
On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History (ALA Notable Books for Adults)
Seller: ThriftBooks-Dallas, Dallas, TX, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. Former library book; May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G0307266427I4N10
Quantity: 1 available
Stock Image
On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History (ALA Notable Books for Adults)
Seller: ThriftBooks-Dallas, Dallas, TX, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Hardcover. Condition: Good. No Jacket. Former library book; Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G0307266427I3N10
Quantity: 2 available
Seller Image
On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History (ALA Notable Books for Adults)
Seller: Goodwill, Brooklyn Park, MN, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Condition: good. Cover Case has some rubbing and edgewear. Access codes, CD's, slipcovers and other accessories may not be included. Seller Inventory # 2Y6Z1H0005E9_ns
Quantity: 1 available