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The History of Paper and Paper Production
The inventor of paper is purported to be the Chinese court
official Ts’ ai Lun, who, as reported in the Chinese royal
chronicles (Hou Hanshu), began to produce paper out of
rags and plant fibres in the year 105 C.E. The secret of
making paper was guarded in the Middle Kingdom for over
seven hundred years, before the process became known in
Germany by way of Arabia, Egypt, Spain and southern Italy.
The oldest European manuscript on paper was produced in
Spain earlier than 1036, a Breviarium et Missale mozarabicum,
which was composed at the monastery of Santo
Domingo de Silos near Burgos on Arabian paper. Arabian
paper was already used in Sicily in 1061. The oldest paper
manuscript from the German-speaking realm is considered
to be the register of Albert Behaim from the Bavarian
monastery of Aldersbach, most of which is written on paper
from Italy, but which was begun in 1246 on Spanish-
Arabian paper.
It was no longer a particularly large step from using imported
paper to producing it in one’s own country. In Spain,
paper probably began to be produced before 1150 and in
Italy, before 1230 (Tschudin 2002) (Ill. 1). Documents record
the first paper producer in Fabriano as early as 1283. Fabri-
Ill. 1: Chronological spread of papermaking in Europe (based on
Tschudin)
12
II The History of Paper und Paper Production
from the Middle Ages to Modern Times
ano’s rival was Amalfi, where, however, the independent
production of paper is verifiable only from 1289.
From the thirteenth century, the spread of paper production
in Europe resulted in parchment, the material that had
generally been used for writing until that time, to be slowly
replaced. This development was helped considerably by the
founding of paper mills. In the German-speaking regions,
the “Gleismühl” paper mill of Ulman Stromer in Nuremberg,
founded in 1390, is considered the first of its kind.
Other
paper mills were established in Ravensburg (1391), Augsburg
(1468), Kempten (1477), Memmingen (1481), Ettlingen
(1482), Reutlingen (1486) and Landshut (1489)
(Schweizer). It is remarkable that in the German-speaking
areas, papermakers did not organize themselves into guilds.
This was based on the understanding that papermaking
was a free trade and thus its practitioners did not have to
be part of a guild.
How was paper made? The production of paper in the
Middle Ages had two steps: First, plant fibres were broken
down and dissolved. The second step involved binding
these dissolved fibres into a new material. In the Middle
Ages linen rags furnished the basic raw material for making
paper. Collecting rags and fabric scraps was the responsibility
of rag collectors, who gathered used clothing, linens and
rags from the populace. The rag collecting trade was often
tied to bartering. Silk and wool was sorted out from the
discarded fabric as unsuitable for making paper. The rag
collectors offered their fabric scraps to the paper mills, the
first customer having the advantage of being able to pick
out the best pieces for finer paper. It can be shown that official
regulations limited the trade in rags geographically already
early, and therefore it is possible to closely determine
where the rags used by a particular paper mill came from.
After the rags had been collected, sorted and soaked, and
the retting (rotting process) had broken down the woven
fibres, the complete separation of the fabric was carried out
by machinery that hammered and beat the pulp. In the second
step of the papermaking process, a paper mould was
needed in order to form paper out of the fibre pulp (Ill. 2).
The main parts of such a mould are a wooden frame (deckle)
and a screen. The latter is formed of laid-lines (ribbing
wires) running closely parallel to each other, and perpendicular
chain-lines (warp wires). This wire grid is so tightly
arranged that when scooping the paper pulp out of the vat,
the water runs off but the fibres remain as a thin film on
the screen.