Papermaking: A Rags to Riches Story

First-time visitors to the Rare Book Reading Room are often surprised by the good condition of even the oldest books in our collection. “This paper is in way better shape than the books I found in my grandparents’ house,” one patron offered. “Is it because you store these books in a vacuum-sealed vault or something?” While, yes, the Library of Congress takes its responsibility to preserve its materials very seriously and, yes, the stacks are controlled for temperature and humidity (though they are not air-sealed), the primary reason that our books have survived the centuries so well is that many were printed on paper of extremely high quality.

When you open that old book from your grandparent’s library, you might find the paper thin, yellowed, and falling apart under the touch of your hands. This brittleness resulted from a 19th century change in Western papermaking practices, when industrial paper mills, meeting the rising demand for reading material within an increasingly literate society, began using wood pulp in a cheaper, faster, mass-produced type of paper. Unfortunately, wood pulp is highly acidic, and books made from that kind of paper deteriorate over time and become borderline impossible to preserve, repair, or restore. With apologies to Quentin Tarantino, pulp fiction wasn’t made to last.

Older books, by contrast, were printed on high-quality paper made from cloth rags, not wood pulp. Beginning in the 1300s, the Italians adopted and adapted techniques first developed in China and the Middle East, and their innovations spread throughout Europe, lasting for centuries as the highest standard in paper production.

Here’s how this sort of rag paper was made:

First, a door-to-door rag vendor would visit homes and businesses to collect old linen rags and worn-out clothing, kind of like a junk collection service today. These ragpickers would then sell their sacks of collected rags to a merchant who would store them in a warehouse. There, workers would sort the rags by color and fabric, clean them, remove seams, buckles, and buttons, and then cut the cloth into smaller pieces.

Rags of white linen were highly prized for their use in making fine white paper, but other colors and types of cotton cloth were also used to make rougher, less expensive papers. It is worth noting that England was centuries behind other European nations in making paper: their clothes being made predominantly from wool, the English lacked the necessary supply of linen rags made from the lighter-weight clothing that people wore in warmer places like Italy, Spain, and France. Shakespeare’s First Folio, for example, was printed on imported French paper in 1623. In fact, the English passed a series of laws in the 1600s that made it illegal to bury a deceased person in cotton or linen, saving an estimated 200,000 pounds of cloth for the use of papermakers each year. So, grandpa had to spend eternity in wool; let’s hope he wasn’t going anyplace too hot.

Once cleaned and sorted, the rags were tossed in a liquid solution of water and lime that would help to isolate impurities and begin the deterioration process called “retting.” These rags would be piled up and covered by a tarp for a week to eleven days of fermentation, beginning to deteriorate into the cloth pulp that would eventually be made into paper.

After a carefully calibrated period of retting, the merchant would sell a pile of rags to a paper mill. A single mill in the 1300s might buy around 6,000 pounds of rags in a season. Once at the mill, the rags would be dumped into a trough-like system filled with clean water, and the mill’s water wheel would power a series of heavy stampers that pounded the rags into a thick, liquified “slurry” of fibers. After two or three phases of grinding the rags under rows of variously shaped metal blades at the base of the stampers, the finest paper mills were able to achieve a creamy slurry of consistent texture and without imperfections.

When the slurry was thoroughly beaten, it was transferred into a large wooden vat heated from below. The “vatman,” an experienced laborer with a prestigious position within the hierarchy of the mill, would dip a wood-framed wire mould — almost like a copper mesh tray — into the vat.

When the vatman carefully lifted the mould out of the thick, warm slurry, a layer of rag pulp would evenly cover the top of the tightly woven wire mesh. The vatman would shake the mould side to side and top to bottom to smooth and interlock the fibers of pulp. He did this roughly 100 times an hour, 1,000 times a day.

Today, we can see the evidence of this stage of the papermaking process when examining the paper in our old books by noticing the visible thin wire lines and thicker chain lines that were subtly impressed upon the pulp by the mould.

Watermarks, which were made of silver wires woven into the lines of the mould, are also visible from this stage of the process. Given the valuable resources and careful coordination of skilled labor that contributed to the making of each sheet of paper, these watermarks served as authenticating branding for a paper mill, distinguishing the work of one company of craftsmen from another.

The mould would be set aside so that excess liquid could drain from the sheet. Then, another worker, called a “coucher,” would flip the mould over, release the sheet onto a bed of wool felt to dry, and hurry the mould back to the vatman for its next dip into the slurry. Once the mill had around 250 sheets drying in this state, workers would stack them with felt layered in-between, place the stack under a wooden screw press, and turn it to squeeze out more water.

At this point, another worker, called a “layer,” would peel apart the paper sheets from the felt, and the stack would be pressed again to release more moisture. Finally, the sheets would be moved to an open-air loft and hung on hemp cords to dry out.

The final step in the papermaking process was to apply a coating of gelatin to the paper to strengthen it and to prepare it to receive ink properly. The sheets were then dried again, stacked under a weight for flattening, and eventually packaged for transport. The craftsmen of the paper mill would work 9-12 hours a day at this physically demanding labor, producing between 700 and 1500 sheets daily depending on the size of the operation.

Once the stacks arrived in a city workshop, another set of workers would polish and smooth the sheets with glass and stones. The paper would be folded, packaged, and ultimately sold to printers in reams of 500 sheets. The cost of purchasing these reams of fine paper typically represented half of the total expense of making a book in the 1400-1700s.

Although discarded cloth rags represented the essential material in these fine, expensive reams of paper, the wealth of skilled labor and human ingenuity involved in the production process has allowed these treasured books to enrich the lives of readers across a span of 500 years. From rags to riches indeed.

 

Sources & Further Reading:

Albro, Sylvia Rodgers. (2016) Fabriano: City of Medieval and Renaissance Papermaking. The Library of Congress.

Barrett, T. (2022). “European Papermaking Techniques 1300-1800.” Paper through Time: Nondestructive Analysis of 14th- through 19th-Century Papers (2022). University of Iowa.

Finkelstein D., McCleery A. (2013). An Introduction to Book History. Routledge.

Werner, S. (2019). Studying Early Printed Books: 1450-1800. Wiley Blackwell.

 

 

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