Paper Making Cathy Baker Detailed Show Notes Ep 367

Text on this page is a rough transcript from our interview (unless otherwise noted). Details under the images are related to the picture or artifact and are not reflective of any comments by the guest.

Paper Was Made From Linen

In a word—rags. If the paper was meant for objects that were to last, such as writing paper, book paper, paper for illustrations (woodcuts/engravings) those kinds of paper were always made of really good quality rags. How a rag becomes good Quality, is because these rags even after they’ve been used, finely woven linen or hempen coming from hemp—were all converted into paper. For more ephemeral objects, like wrapping paper—poor quality rags were used, possibly also adding ropes or burlap fibers, or other woven or even. 

Generally for wrapping meats, wrapping sugar was too early, but there was also sugar paper—which was blue—but it could be used for other sorts of uses. A good quality brown paper, really strong was used for housing construction use—every single available source of fiber was used for paper eventually. Not particularly in England, because paper making in England only started in the late 15th century. Only 100 years before Shakespeare. 

Paper Had a Standard Size

Based on the sizes of books that could be made form animal skin—the leaves of the books were made from animal skin. It is a finite size, so manuscript or people who prepared parchment for manuscripts and layout animal skins to decide how many folios they could get out of that skin because the manuscript edition was so long, (over 1000 years before paper) it was natural for people making paper to adopt the same sizes as parchment. THings haven’t changed very much—if you look at the sizes of paper over a long period of time, they remain within a few inches. 

If he was writing scripts for his plays, he would have used a standard writing size, a little different but made for books. 

One sheet of paper, folded in half, and either tear it down the fold for two sheets of writing paper or you could cut it. So writing paper was a portion of a standard size or nearly a standard size, and then the full sheet could be folded down to make different sizes. 

Manufacturing Paper

With rags—they were collected and sorted by color, and type of weave, sorted by amount of wear, and damage. They were assigned a grade, representing raw material for different paper of different uses (plate paper, wrapping paper, writing paper, etc). The finest grade of rags were cut into small pieces and set aside in a pile to ferment, in a process called retting —to break down the woven structure of the cloth, softened the material, cleaned the rags of whatever was on it for how it was used—and make that material into a pulp—once the retting was complete, the rags were put into a stamper. This is a mechanized masher, and after a long time of stamping and rinsing with water, the rags were completely broken down into individual fibers. By the time the pulp comes out of the stamper, it is much whiter than it was when it went into the stamper, the problem with the stamper was that it took a great deal of time, sometimes many days, for the retted cloth to reduce to pulp. In the late 1600s, well after Shakespeare’s death a hollander beater was invented in the Netherlands. This machine dramatically reduced the amount of time that was needed to reduce the rags to pulp. That pulp was put into a large vat, with lots of water, and a vat man formed the sheets of paper onto hand mold that is put into sheets. 

Buying Paper

You have to have access to a large space and specific building construction. Water wheel has to generate power, tons of water involved, specialized equipment like stampers, you have to have vats, very large presses, and a loft to dry the paper. It was not practical at all for an individual to make their own paper. He would have bought his paper from a stationer, and that paper could have been made in England, but good quality paper was not available in England, so for good paper it is more likely he imported paper from France or Holland. 

Compare 16th Century Paper to Modern Printer Paper

The biggest different between 16th C and 21st is the source of fiber. The fiber source for good quality paper was rags, but modern day paper, all of those fibers is trees, so we have two very different sources of fiber. Linen comes from the flax plant, and our modern paper comes from trees. Except for the difference in processing, from the beater or stamping stage on, all papers share common techniques for the formation of sheets. In the 16th century this was all done by hand, and it started to be done by machines in the 19th century. 

Paper Vs Vellum Vs Parchment

Paper is always made from a vegetable fiber. Parchment and Vellum is always protein fibers, or animal skins. The vegetable fibers for rag paper, is flax or hemp and parchment from wool or silk, both of which are proteinaceous cannot be made into paper, nor can synthetic fibers like polyester, they can’t bond with each other like vegetable fibers can to make a cohesive durable sheet. Parchment is completely different because it’s made from goat and sheep most commonly. Parchment can be made from any kind of animal, including deer. Parchment refers to a process rather than the raw material. As long as you have an animal skin, you can convert it into parchment on any kind of animal to hand. Most of us when we think of using an animal skin, we think of using a tanned skin, or leather (rather than parchment) and that’s a shade of brown, soft, supple and pliable, relatively thick and durable. Parchment is a process that yields s skin that’s white, or slightly yellow. It’s thinner and stiffer than tanned leather—it is used as a writing or printing surface. Vellum is a kind of parchment—it is very fine, thin, sheet of parchment, and usefully this fine ness is due to the young age of the animal.

Script Paper

Canvas is a woven material—it is very heavy duty thread that is woven into a cloth but this cloth is really relatively thick and quite stout, and it is primed by coating the surface (one side after it’s stretched over a wooden frame). You prime the canvas before you can paint on it. You ply the paint on a smooth white surface, it’s a material is called Gesso (calcium sulfate and binder, usually glue—coated in several coats to completely remove any evidence that the canvas is still there). This is completely inappropriate for writing a script or printing because it is way too thick and extremely expensive (takes so long compared to paper).
 

Preservation Techniques For Paper

People think of paper as being very vulnerable, but it is an incredibly durable permanent material given it’s thickness. You have to do a lot to paper to get it to disintegrate entirely, and that might not be possible unless you burn it. As an example—paper survived the Titanic. You can expect a lot out of paper, but of course we want to preserve them. The preservation requirements for anything made out of paper is to keep it dry. Avoid water staining, and mold growing on the paper. Books are well protected by their bindings. The binding can suffer from a water vent, but the paper will survive inside. Loose sheets of paper like letters or drawings rarely have the protection of a binding so those materials are kept in boxes or drawers and stored off the floor on shelfs. Other problems include exposure to any light—thought the paper in Shakespeare’s paper was much less effected by light, compared to modern newspaper which fades and gets brittle after exposure to light.
Manufactured paper rivals handmade paper. High temps and humidity are problematic, which will speed up adverse chemical reactions. So if you take these fairly simple precautions, you can expect materials made on paper to last a long time. When paper was first introduced into the West, it was seen as a very non permanent material, they preferred parchment because it thought tone more durable, but in fact, paper was much more durable. Generally parchment was phased out once they realized this difference.