It’s four thirty in the afternoon on a drizzly November Monday and here I am, forking wet, foul smelling strips of linen from a pot on my stove into a blender. I take one of the smaller measuring cups with painted cherries on it that my mom gave me for my birthday and scoop two cupfuls of murky, brownish gold — also foul smelling — water into the blender, tightly hold down the top and hit the “ice/crush” button with a little more vigour than necessary. Blend baby, blend. The blender whirrs unhappily as the linen strips are turned into a mushy pulp. Off goes the blender and out comes the newly-made-pulp. This process continues for another 40 minutes. So why exactly am I spending my afternoon over a blender instead of in bed desperately trying to catch up on Ulysses for tomorrow? Believe it or not, I’m actually making paper.
I’ve always been a book enthusiast. My trifecta of literary scholarship includes a major in Book and Media Studies and minors in Literary Studies and English. When I arrived at U of T, books and literature were synonymous. A book was not just a vessel for the words and ideas of Jane Austen and John Fowles, but a book, you see, is really so much more. A book is a material object. Like the million little plastic pieces that make up your ballpoint pen, a book is made up of layouts, fonts, cover art, page numbers, marginalia, and paper. This might all seem very obvious to you, but to me, it was mind-blowing. I haven’t looked at a book the same way since, and somewhere along the way, I picked up a passion for paper.
People always talk about how many advertisements you see in a day, but how many pieces of paper do you think you see in a day? How much paper is in your life? Probably a lot. The foundation of this newspaper and your current involvement at this university is almost entirely reliant on the 15th-century development of paper (the printing press also had a fair amount to do with it).
I know all this because I am currently enrolled in a class called The Medieval Book through the Medieval Studies department. We learn about things like what the difference is between a medieval and ancient scroll, what a gloss text is and, of course, how they used to make paper. Our final assignment is to recreate a medieval artifact in the medieval way. Having no interest in making parchment, which involves dipping animal skin in lyme (I’m a vegetarian), I jumped at the chance to make paper. I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into.
So how exactly does one make paper?
Step One: The Pulp
There are two ways to make pulp. First, there’s the hard way — the way that involves stealing your household’s dutch oven in the prime of soup making season and soaking linen in said dutch oven for four weeks on low heat — also known as my way, the fifteenth century way. I wouldn’t suggest this way. I would suggest the easy way. I would suggest you finish reading this lovely copy of The Varsity, rip it into long strips, and dunk it in water for a couple of hours. Either way, you’re going to need a blender.
As one person told me when I started this assignment, you know it’s ready when it smells — at least that’s how it goes with linen; if you’re doing this from newspaper, you know it’s ready when it’s soaking wet.
So you have your mushy newspaper or your smelly, mealy linen and basically you blend it until it turns into a really fine pulp. This shouldn’t take very long — maybe three minutes in the blender if you have some especially stubborn linen.
Step Two: The Frame
This is where things get tricky. In order to make paper, you need to have what’s called a frame, which is basically four pieces of wood nailed together to make a rectangle; then a porous material like cheesecloth will be spread across the frame, covering the centre. The frame can be as big or as small as you want. Sometimes a special symbol will be sewn into the center of the porous material called a watermark.
In professional artisan papermaking operations, the papermaker will have a huge vat full of a mixture of pulp and water. They will take a hold of their frame on either side and dip it into the vat to the very bottom, picking up pulp along the way, like a gold panner. As they bring the frame up out of the water, the water drains through the cheesecloth and hopefully, an even spread of pulp will be left over the entire centre of the frame. This is harder than it sounds. For those of us without humongous vats, carefully placing and spreading the pulp over the cheesecloth with your hands also works, but not quite as well.
Once your frame is covered in pulp, you have to press out the excess water. It has to be a large, even-surfaced object that will cover most of the inside of the frame. I used a cutting board; in the olden days, they had a special piece of wood.
Step 3: The Waiting Game
After all the water has been pressed out of the paper pulp, carefully turn the frame over allowing the pulp to fall out. Very carefully place it in a safe spot to dry. Depending on how thick your paper is, this could take anywhere between one and four days.
Step 4: Is This Really Necessary?
So your pulp is now dry, and technically you have successfully made paper. If you’ve used this issue of The Varsity, your paper is probably a grayish colour and not horribly appealing. Luckily, the colour of your paper will change depending on what you make your pulp from. Using old class notes will probably yield a color similar to whatever color pen you write in, while using extra yellow flyers from your last club event will yield new yellow paper.
When they were making paper in the fifteenth century, after the paper would dry, they would dip the paper in clean water and then rub it smooth with a pumice stone. The final step would then be to dip the page in a gelatin made from boiling vellum or leather and allowing the fat to excrete. This would prevent the ink from running on the page; it also sounds disgusting. I would skip this step.
As much as I grimace as I scoop this goop into a blender, I also revel in it. This is an amazing tradition that has literally changed the world. And I have to admit I might have jumped for joy when my linen finally turned to pulp — not just because the success of this project is worth 40 per cent of my final mark, but because this is, in its own way, fun, or at the very least makes for a good story.
