Rags and Trees

Arthur Waley's "Translations from the Chinese," 1941

"Love Books of Ovid," 1930

Recently, I went back to writing these posts on an old, wrinkled legal pad (a light greenish blue one, not the flashy yellow kind),  We can't do without pixels now, but scratching on paper is really more satisfying.  As there's a lot of paper around us, we take it for granted.  But there was a time fairly recently when that was not the case at all.

When Brooklyn College scholar Alice Kober did some research at Cambridge University after World War II, she found there was still a serious paper shortage (along with everything else, like heating fuel:  the office was in the 40s F inside during the late winter).  It was not only scarce, what there was was of the poorest quality; it would not even take ink sometimes.  Back home in New York during the war, dealing with domestic shortages, she cut up scraps of paper into 2" x 3" rectangles to serve as index cards and filed them in cigarette cartons.

Bad paper quality is three things: it's  made of short rather than long fibers, is all wood pulp (cellulose) with no fabric ("rag") content, and has been mechanically rather than chemically mashed up  (the mechanical process releases lignin which promotes acid damage).

The Trouble with Acid

Acids in paper age it more quickly and make it brownish and brittle.  There is more than one way for acid to end up in paper, and it did a lot of that from the mid-nineteenth century to about 1980.  Before about 1850, paper was made from linen and cotton clothing rags and it remained stronger and more durable than paper made of wood pulp.  Paper is coated with sizing, which is necessary to reduce moisture and ink absorption, and when alum-rosin sizing was the kind used, it produced sulfuric acid when exposed to humidity.  Browning at the edges of a book's pages ("foxing") is from pollutants in the air.  Poor paper just doesn't get a break:  high-acid books, magazines and newspaper will all be gone eventually, while quality products from the rag age can survive quite a while.

Alkaline sizing, which goes a long way to preserve paper, was developed in the 1950s, but did not become widely used until the early 1980s.

Alas, if you're in need of high quality paper, you'll have to go online since the big box office supply stores have driven the local stationary shops away.  Your last resort these days is a craft/fabric store  It is comforting to look back into "art" books made during the 1930s like the two pictured at the beginning.  The pages are heavy, colored like light cream, and well suited to reproducing the excellent commissioned illustrations.  Like Ezra Pound's "old men with beautiful manners," they are, unfortunately, of the past and "will come no more.".
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