Can you write on it? my son said when I showed him the paper I made. And I was briefly crestfallen - after all, what's the purpose of paper on which you cannot make a mark? Or at least, if you make a mark, it will soak in, be rendered illegible. What is paper for?
As a reader, writer and editor of a certain age, paper is at the core of my life. I've been surrounded by books for as long as I can remember. The first job I loved was in a book publisher's - and real and important part of the joy of that work was that at the end of a long process of thinking of things people might want to read about, finding authors, working beside them on their scripts, editing them, designing the pages, choosing cover artwork, selling the idea to the sales teams, at the end of all that, a box would arrive on my desk with a pile of brand new books. Real, solid objects which together we had created, and which we hoped to send out into the world for thousands of people to read. And those books were made of paper.
I know that e-books are wonderful. I've downloaded a couple myself (Mary Kingsley's Travels in West Africa being the most recent - sadly not available in my county library). But they don't have the feel of a book.
Books, and paper, have heft. They have physical character. A long one weighs heavy in your hand. Pulp fiction is, well, pulpy. Leave it out in the rain and it dissolves. Even when disposable, they're something.
And beautiful paper is something else again. My first ever business cards (long, long ago) were hand printed, letter press, on gorgeous laid card. I almost couldn't bear to give them away. Each letter sank into the card, floated on the waves of its gently rippling surface. They were objects of beauty. And not very useful, as I spent those early freelance years huddled at my desk, not out and about meeting future clients.
Anyway, this weekend I went up to Birmingham, to a conference of intervenors - people who work one-to-one with congenitally deafblind children and adults, enabling them to take part in the world. They're a real pleasure to spend time with - you probably couldn't find a more communicative, caring and varied bunch in any other church hall in the country. And we had great fun (and made a great mess) making paper - a perfect activity to do with pretty much anyone, including the people they support.
The idea wasn't to make paper that has a function, but simply to see what happens when you make the basics of paper from recycled office shreddings, and add anything that comes to hand. In my case, bits of grass and petals from the space outside the hall - but you can mix in seeds (which will grown if you plant the paper), glitter, feathers, spices ...
I can't say that my paper was exactly an object of beauty, but I love the way that letters from the old shreddings peep out, and that grass stems are enveloped in the pulp, which just sometimes reveals its own origins in its fibres.
My piece about intervenors will be in the next issue of Talking Sense, due out in about a month. It's published by Sense, the deafblind charity. http://www.sense.org.uk/
I think that paper looks beautiful!! Whenever I get bought a really nice notepad I can't write in it. It's too much pressure to find words good enough for the paper!
ReplyDeleteYou're not alone - I've a good friend who only writes in cheap and scrappy notepads because she loves good stationery too much to sully it with her thoughts. Me, I must have a big ego. I have a stack of little Moleskines, a treat definitely as they're so ridiculously over-priced. But they're such pleasing objects that they make me feel as though my garbled notes could turn into something special.And they survive being carted around in my pockets and bags, pulled out in rainy fields, dropped in puddles, scattered in egg-frying fat, all quite unscathed.
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