Kurlansky moves from music notation to clocks to compasses in the space of a few pages, and we find ourselves in Picasso’s studio by way of the lithograph. Not long afterwards, Hernán Cortés colonises Mexico, Rembrandt discovers etching, graphite pencils are on sale in London and Thomas Bewick starts engraving on wood. The journey begins in China around AD120, but we are soon in Spain in AD900 and then 15th-century Italy and Germany. Much of the time his subject is less the history of paper than the spread of language and printing – paper as its own document. “Exactly how paper was conceived of is a mystery,” he states, a flattening start. His main problem is that paper is not a pliant or obliging character. Rather than clarifying our thoughts on the subject Kurlansky explodes them, paper as confetti, the subject scattered into a hundred little pieces. The author uses paper to write about two millennia of intellectual and cultural advance, cramming so much in that his far-reaching reference points are both impressive and slightly destabilising. Paper has tracked and accelerated civilisation like nothing else, enabling communication, germinating ideas, logging trade, documenting history. Paper didn’t just “change the world” as many of the other single-subject books argue. Too much of the time it’s one bit of damn paper after another
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