Book review: White Magic: The Age of Paper, by Lothar Müller
Paper, like film and the phonograph, revolutionised our cultures but have now been replaced by digital alternatives. As paper increasingly fades into history, the story of its role and evolution is at risk of being lost, erasing the roadmap that brought us to the digital era.
by Lothar Müller
Polity
Paper, like film and the phonograph, revolutionised our cultures but have now been replaced by digital alternatives. As paper increasingly fades into history, the story of its role and evolution is at risk of being lost, erasing the roadmap that brought us to the digital era.
Lothar Müller's White Magic: The Age of Paper goes a long way to averting that fate, going back in time to record and describe in intricate detail how paper came to be, and what it came to be. Müller, a "literary scholar and newspaper journalist interested in cultural studies", writes that in researching this book he was "focused on what modern European literature knows about the material from which it is made" - and he achieves his goal.
Müller sets out by describing how the Silk Road was also a paper road, as paper was a cultural technique that seeped from China to the Arab world before being popularised in Europe from the 13th century onwards.
Each move came with, and as a result of, innovations in production and materials while reflecting the economics and geopolitics of the time. Mechanisation of the English textile industry increased the supply of rags, a key raw material for paper production until the late 1800s, when the paper industry made another geographical shift.
"Rag paper came by its raw materials most easily in places with a high population density. But the move to mechanical and chemical wood pulp meant the sparsely populated but heavily forested regions of North America and Northern Europe quickly grew in importance," Müller writes.