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  We say we keep a diary. More to the point, a diary keeps us on its crumbling, rotting paper pages. Such a fragile substance to carry so heavy a burden: the preservation of a culture.

  WHAT LIES BENEATH

  I’ve always thought of paper as a kind of silent butler that delivers words and images to a reader. But the paper itself is telling a story quite apart from the one that is told in ink.

  Paper’s own history runs underneath, around, and through the story that is printed on it, a sotto voce narrative of conquest and invention. The art of papermaking travelled eastward from China to Korea and Japan, then westward along the Silk Road into modern-day Burma, to the central Asian city of Samarkand. Chinese prisoners captured in Samarkand brought papermaking to the Arabs, who took the process to the Middle East, Egypt, and North Africa, where Muslims recorded the insights of the Islamic Golden Age for posterity. By the Battle of Hastings in 1066, paper itself was in Spain, although papermaking didn’t make its debut there and in France until around a hundred years later. The famed Fabriano paper mills of Italy started up in the late 1200s; Austria, Germany, and Switzerland were making paper by 1411; Flanders, Poland, and England around the time that Columbus sailed. A hundred years later, Bohemia, Russia, and Holland adopted the invention. Scotland, by 1591. The Spaniards were operating a paper mill at Culhuacán, Mexico, as early as 1575. The first American mill was established in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1690. And the first paper mill in Canada started production in Argenteuil, Quebec, in 1805.

  Our world is now so heavily papered that it is hard to imagine that paper was first met with suspicion and fear. But to Europeans seeing it for the first time in the hands of Muslims, paper was heathen. It was weak: look how easily a sheet could be crushed and torn! Paper was ephemeral: it wouldn’t last a year. A substitute for parchment? Ludicrous! Parchment, and its rich cousin, vellum, could preserve thoughts as words for centuries.

  But parchment was laborious and expensive to make. An average-sized manuscript required the skins of twenty sheep or goats for parchment, even more lambs, calves, or kids if it was vellum. And by the beginning of the thirteenth century, the copying of manuscripts was a growth industry: the production of scrolls was moving out of monasteries and into the city, where scriptoriums housed writers, illuminators, and book binders working together to fill the libraries of nobles, wealthy merchants, and municipalities. Making paper from plants and rags was far faster, easier, and cheaper than scraping and curing the skins of beasts.

  The first paper to make its way to Europe was thin, soft, and pliable—a bit like our toilet paper. It was ideal for Chinese calligraphy and block printing, but much too soft for the sharpened quills of the Europeans. It was the Italians who hardened paper by adding animal gelatin to the “stuff,” producing a stiff, impervious surface that could take the scratch of a pen on both sides without the ink showing through.

  When Johannes Gutenberg began his experiments with mechanical movable type in 1440, paper was one of the first of the problems he had to overcome. Ironically, the stiff paper developed for quills and scribner’s ink resisted the imprint of type. Gutenberg tried dampening a sheet before putting it through the press, and suddenly, the metal letters were able to make their mark. Dampening was tricky, though. Too much moisture and, the paper turned to mush; too little and the type bounced off the surface. Eventually, Gutenberg discovered the trick of dampening every other sheet and pressing them together for a few hours, just long enough that the moisture would equalize—the same way my mother taught me to dampen one side of a cotton sheet, then fold it over and in on itself, leaving it until the fabric was uniformly damp enough to iron smooth.

  Dampening the paper solved the problem of creating an impression to hold the ink, but it caused another: not only did the ink have to dry, now the paper had to dry, too. This is the creation chant of paper: each solution provoked a new problem to overcome. After Gutenberg came the coaters and the millers, all the thousands of entrepreneurs and inventors who make possible the thick, slick papers in art books today; the lightly toothed pages of poetry chapbooks; the rough, brown pages of pulp novels.

  Every sheet of paper is infused with the saga of its own evolution, but it can carry a personal story, too. In 1987, when I moved to Kingston, I found a cache of letters in the attic of my house. Hundreds of pieces of paper were strewn across the rough plank floor, spilling out of boxes, bags, and rusting cookie tins. Among the tracts and letters and diaries was a distinct and startling correspondence: seventy-nine letters from an inmate in Kingston Penitentiary to a girl of seventeen who lived in Portsmouth, a country village that has since been swallowed by the city. The inmate’s letters—kites, as they are still called on the inside—were written on whatever he could beg, borrow, or steal. The back of a calendar. Toilet paper. Stationery lifted from the warden’s office. No other correspondence like it exists in the English-speaking world: dozens of letters written from inside a prison and smuggled over the wall, uncensored.

  For eight years, as I wrote The Convict Lover, I kept the rolls and squares of pilfered paper close. I transcribed the words on the pages into computer files that I printed out so that I wouldn’t have to touch the crumbling paper any more than necessary, but the actual letters never left my desk. Those papers held the convict’s touch. His fingers, stiff with cold in his unheated cell, had made the clumsy folds, tied the butcher’s cord and, once, a pale blue ribbon, around the thin rolls. His calloused palm hid the note until he could slide it under the guards’ shack in the centre of the stone quarry, where Phyllis Halliday found it, grasping it in her hand, holding it tight in her apron, hiding it in an Ovaltine tin shoved under her bed, moving the letters house to house for seventy years, until I lifted them from her attic into the light.

  When I finished writing the book, I donated the convict’s letters to the Queen’s University archives. Months later, I was invited to view the collection. I felt as if I were coming to visit a long-time friend, one who was a little worn out by his travels, but who was safe now from the deterioration of age and circumstance.

  I was shocked to see the rolls and squares of paper pressed flat, trapped rigid between plastic sheets, the life drained out of them. The words were still there but, for me, the words had been such a small part of the story. Gone was the convict’s touch, the possibility that my thumbprint might land exactly where his had pressed almost a century before. It hardly seemed to me like paper. More like concrete. A monument. Moribund.

  I have another letter that I doubt will ever end up in an archive. I found it stuffed into a purple velvet Crown Royal bag that was balled up inside a pillow case that huddled in the corner of an old box I found at the bottom of the cedar chest my aunt kept at the foot of her bed for as long as I knew her. My aunt and uncle had no children: when they died, it was left to my sisters and me to clear out their apartment.

  The letter was torn into tiny bits. Throw it out, my sisters said; it’s private. But I couldn’t. We tear up letters to get rid of them; we put them in a cedar chest to keep them. This was a letter my aunt wasn’t willing to part with.

  I spent the better part of a week putting the letter back together. The pieces were tiny and thoroughly mixed up, as if my aunt had ripped the letter in a frenzy and pitched the pieces into the air, then patiently gathered them up and looked around for something to hide them in: the velvet bag that had held her husband’s quart of whisky.

  She hadn’t found all of them. Even after I placed every fragment, sentence to sentence, there were still gaps in the jigsaw puzzle of the letter. The single page had been closely written on both sides, with sentences trailing up the narrow margins. It was from a woman, addressed to my uncle. The date was missing. But the paper was one of those thin blue airmail sheets with glued edges on two sides, a letter and envelope all in one; it had been sent from England, where my uncle, a pilot, was stationed during the Second World War. The return address was Sussex. The woma
n was pleading. Some of the ink had run; across the centre, the paper was buckled, as if soaked by tears, or maybe spilled tea. Each scrap of paper was smaller than my thumbnail, yet they were all deeply creased, as if the letter had been crumpled in my aunt’s fist before she ripped it to shreds.

  I taped the pieces to a clear sheet and put the letter fragment in a plastic sleeve, not unlike the ones that hold The Convict Lover kites. When I die, one of my children, or a child of their children, will find it. They’ll ponder the torn paper, trying to decipher the story it tells, or they’ll toss it into a dumpster already overflowing with the paper detritus of my life.

  PAPER, SCISSORS, ROCK

  I am a messy gardener and a messy cook. My old cookbooks are splattered maps, like those of my mother and my friend Ida, who writes NOT GOOD!!!! or Tasty! beside the titles of recipes.

  I hardly use cookbooks anymore. I look up recipes online. I trace my finger down the screen, a greasy stripe that I wash away with a cloth dampened with vinegar. My children and my children’s children won’t know which recipes I liked best or why.

  I have abandoned legacy for the sake of convenience. I am not the only one. In the 1990s, the New York Public Library—and ultimately every library in the country—gave up its card catalogues in favour of a searchable database. I used to spend hours with the card catalogues in my local libraries, idly thumbing the cards, waiting for the inspiration of coincidence: looking up monarch and finding Malcolm Lowry loitering nearby, which led to Lunar Caustic and the lovely, pale green luna moth. I loved the jittery type across the top of each card, the o and e filled in by the ink-caked keys of some ancient typewriter and, below the essential details of title and author and number of pages, notations in black ink or blue, handwritten by one librarian after another. On the backs of the cards, spelling corrections and comments, mini reviews and recommendations, directions to other books by the same author, catalogued under her secret nom de plume. The cards were coded conspiracies among readers, like the pin-pricked notes that inmates would leave in prison library books, a silent telegraph from one book-lover to the next.

  When my local library threw out its card catalogue, stacks of cards lay on the checkout counter, free to readers needing bookmarks. I took as many as I dared, worried that some catastrophe would shut down the electrical system and the new digital database with it. I didn’t worry about an obliterating fate like the fiery one that destroyed the library at Alexandria (not then, I didn’t) but a lesser catastrophe: books still on the shelves but no way to find them.

  I suffer the anxiety of a culture in flux. I imagine a shepherd a thousand years ago hoarding the hides of his flock in the event the flirtation with paper turned out to be nothing but a passing whim.

  A PUZZLING OF PIXELS

  Paper, in contemporary jargon, is a display technology. So, too, is the screen of a computer or an ereader. As we prepared the ebook of The Paradise Project, my son Erik and I blithely skipped past all the paper decisions: heft, texture, colour, source. The history of paper seemed immaterial as we considered the digital version of the manuscript. Surely a plastic screen was as great a deviation from tree pulp as the scraped skins of donkeys were from stone tablets. Yet paper continued to be strangely present, I discovered, in the evolution of digital displays.

  The first electronic paper—epaper—came out of the Palo Alto Research Center in California, where, in the 1970s, Xerox gathered a world-class team of scientists to become what they claimed would be the “architects of information.” Nick Sheridon, the inventor of the first epaper, called his brainchild Gyricon, a name that has nothing to do with paper and everything to do with how its plastic surrogate is made. Microscopic polyethylene spheres (75–106 micrometres across) are embedded in a transparent silicone sheet, each tiny ball suspended in its own bubble of oil so it can rotate freely. The spheres are Janus particles: their surface boasts two or more distinct physical properties, so that two different types of chemistry can occur on the same particle. In the case of the Gyricon, the Janus particle is composed of negatively charged black plastic on one side and positively charged white plastic on the other. Depending on the polarity of the voltage applied, the white or the black side is face-up, giving the pixel a white or black appearance.

  That’s a wildly simplified explanation, but you get the drift. Epaper made ereaders possible, and in 2004, digital readers using the paper substitute started hitting the market. It wasn’t a complete success. Although the new epaper was reflective (about as reflective as a newspaper, but not as reflective as good white bond), it was slow to refresh, which meant it held onto one image for a second or two after the next image appeared. This “ghosting” is not the same as what happens when a computer screen is left on too long. With epaper, the ghost would disappear if the device was turned on and off repeatedly until the pixels normalized. Some devices would flash the entire screen white then black when loading a new image.

  Over the past dozen years, the architects of information, these modern-day Cai Luns, have been refining their invention, getting rid of the ghosts, striving to produce a plastic that acts as much like paper as is humanly, mechanically, and digitally possible. They are motivated by studies that show, despite every technological advance, many readers still prefer paper.

  The earliest studies—done before 1992 (and before epaper) when only a few of us were reading on our computers—found that comprehension, speed, and accuracy were much lower onscreen. Recent studies, however, find little significant difference between the two. Despite this, many research subjects continue to state a preference for paper. They like the way paper feels. They like being able to shuffle quickly between pages that are chapters apart. They say they don’t feel as tired after reading a paper book.

  Are these just the nostalgic musings of a transitional reading generation?

  I don’t think so. Comprehension matters, but so does comfort.

  Epaper has come a long way since the cathode ray tubes of early computers, but even so digital displays with their glare, pixilation, and flickers can be hard on the eyes. Eye strain, headaches, and blurred vision are so common—affecting around seventy percent of people who work long hours in front of computers—that the American Optometric Association has officially recognized computer vision syndrome (CVS). At least one study claims CVS is epidemic among North Americans.

  Reading from paper is less work, on a whole lot of levels. Working memory is a finite resource: the harder it is to read, the less brainpower is available to shift what we read into memory. Because we weren’t born with specific brain systems for reading, our bodies have had to invent them. Some researchers believe that, as well as reading the actual words, the brain perceives a text as a kind of physical landscape, building maps not unlike the maps we make of hills and valleys and halls and rooms. A paper book presents a more complex topography with more variations on which to hang our memories. The paper itself has texture. It drapes to the left or right when a book is opened. Touching the thickness of the paper and turning it leaves a kind of fingerprint in the mind, a marker of what has been read. It is easier, researchers believe, to make a coherent mental map of a long paper text because of these markers. By comparison, onscreen text is an endless scroll with little physical texture or variation to help fix the words and their meaning in the memory. No wonder we get tired.

  Subconsciously, we understand this. In study after study, students consistently prefer paper over screens if they really need to understand what they are reading. Typically, they’ll cruise a screen to find what they want, but turn to paper to read it intensively.

  The most recent research suggests that reading onscreen is as effective as reading a printed page—exactly what digital devotees want to hear—but there is a difference between effectiveness and pleasure. As Alberto Manguel points out in A History of Reading, our species has had to learn to read: we aren’t hard-wired for it, the way we are for speaking. And we have only been readi
ng silently inside our heads for a thousand years, a drop in the bucket in evolutionary terms. Once we stopped reading out loud, Manguel writes, “the reader was at last able to establish an unrestricted relationship with the book and the words.” That relationship is not insignificant, and like all relationships, it is both sensual and intellectual. And reading on paper is still, at this point, a much more sensual experience than reading onscreen.

  Interestingly, a 2011 study by the cognitive scientists Rakefet Ackerman and Morris Goldsmith found that the expectations of readers—that print or digital would be more efficient and effective—were in fact self-fulfilling. Those who believed print was better scored higher in recall and comprehension when reading from a printed text. And those who believed digital was better had a psychological bias towards etext that made them score better in onscreen reading.

  I wonder if the intangibility of onscreen text plays a role, too, in the paper/pixel preference game. I’ve suffered enough computer crises to know that digital storage is not to be trusted. I now keep backups of my backups. Paper may be fragile, subject to tearing and rot and spilled coffee, but printing words on paper is like carving them in stone compared to the ephemeral world of pixels, where words can disappear from epaper as if written in invisible ink.

  For whatever reason, after almost fifty years of digital innovation, physical paper remains the gold standard. Engineers, designers, and user-interface experts are engaged not in invention but in technological mimicry, working hard to make reading on an ereader or tablet as close to reading on paper as possible. The Kindle screen looks like a page in a paperback. iBooks includes fairly realistic page-turning. Both of these will seem like square wheels if South Korea’s KAIST Institute of Information Technology Convergence perfects its interface that will allow a reader to see already-read pages on the left and unread pages on the right, exactly like a paper book.