Paper
Paging Through History
28 June 2016
Description
From the The New York Times best-selling author of Cod and Salt, a definitive history of paper and the astonishing ways it has shaped today’s world.
Paper is one of the simplest and most essential pieces of human technology. For the past two millennia, the ability to produce it in ever more efficient ways has supported the proliferation of literacy, media, religion, education, commerce and art. It has created civilisations, fostering the fomenting of revolutions and the stabilising of regimes. History’s greatest press run produced 6.5 billion copies of Máo zhu xí yu lu, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Zedong) and Leonardo da Vinci left behind only 15 paintings but 4,000 works on paper. Now, on the cusp of "going paperless"—and amid speculation about the effects of a digitally dependent society—we’ve come to a world-historic juncture to examine what paper means to civilisation.
Through tracing paper’s evolution, Mark Kurlansky challenges common assumptions about technology’s influence, affirming that paper is here to stay. Paper will be the history that guides us forward in the twenty-first century.
Reviews
"The history of paper is a history of cultural transmission, and Kurlansky tells it vividly in this compact, well-illustrated book." — The New York Times
"Kurlansky’s book is published with a deckle edge finish, a process that replaces the regular clean-cut trim of a page with a jagged, pulped roughness... It is a beautiful thing to hold and feel, and it presents a fine argument for the retention of paper as an aesthetically lusty object, let alone one that’s thrived through centuries of change." — The Observer
"Kurlansky expertly argues a case for its [paper's] continuing survival." — The Scotsman
"Kurlansky... explains how something so simple came to play such a vital part in history." — The Sunday Business Post
"Paper is not what you would call a learned book, but one learns an awful lot from it, all packaged in Kurlansky’s whipsmart prose." — The Times
Awards
Longlisted — ALA Carnegie Medal, 2017
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