Making Japanese paper:

      You are living, let us say, in Japan, two thousand years ago. You and your family have planted some trees – mulberry trees. The trees grow. You remove some of the branches of the trees and steam them in order to loosen the inner bark. You peel and dry and soak and scrape and rinse the bark. You find this pleasing: it turns the bark whiter and lighter. The fibres of the bark begin to separate. You boil the bark to soften it further, and then you bleach it in the sun. And then you beat it, and you beat it, and you beat it with a wooden beater and then you throw lumps of this bleached bark pulp into a vat filled with water. And then you mix it and beat it again. And again. You now have a vat of grey mush. You take a wooden frame with a sieve-like screen, dip it into the mush, scoop up the frame, tossing off the excess water, and rock it back and forth until you have a nice, smooth, consistent sheet of mush on your sieve. You allow all the water to drain off. Now you have a sort of damp mat of macerated fibre stuck to your sieve. You remove this mat from the sieve, and place it on a wooden board to dry. It dries, and you smooth it and polish it, maybe with some animal fat or maybe just with a stone, anything you can get your hands on to make it shiny and smooth. And then you trim the edges and admire your handiwork. Congratulations. You have produced a sheet of paper.

      Basically, paper has continued to be made by this method throughout the world to this very day, and seems likely to continue to be made by the same method tomorrow. Compare the ancient Japanese technique to John Evelyn’s description of hand paper-making in seventeenth-century England, for example, from his diary, dated 24 August 1678:

      I went to see my Lord of St. Alban’s house, at Byfleet, an old large building. Thence, to the paper-mills, where I found them making a coarse white paper. They cull the rags which are linen for white paper, woollen for brown; then they stamp them in troughs to a pap, with pestles, or hammers, like the powder-mills, then put it into a vessel of water, in which they dip a frame closely wired with wire as small as a hair and as close as a weaver’s reed; on this they take up the pap, the superfluous water draining through the wire; this they dexterously turning, shake out like a pancake on a smooth board between two pieces of flannel, then press it between a great press, the flannel sucking out the moisture; then, taking it out, they ply and dry it on strings, as they dry linen in the laundry; then dip it in alum-water, lastly, polish and make it up in quires. They put some gum in the water in which they macerate the rags. The mark we find on the sheets is formed in the wire.

      The details may differ, but the processes remain essentially the same (as indeed did Evelyn’s famous note-taking habit, established at the age of just eleven, and which sustained him over seventy years, through Oxford, a Grand Tour, the English Civil War, Cromwell’s Protectorate, the Restoration, and work on dozens of books and treatises).

      Industrial methods have now largely replaced hand-beating and dipping and drying, with mechanical agitators to beat pulp, and high-pressure jets and conveyor belts to spray it and spread it, and vacuums and cylinders and presses to dry it, and rollers to polish it, but there are still really only three stages in the whole paper-production process: the preparing of the pulp; the forming of the paper on a mould or a mesh; and the drying and finishing. In a modern paper plant, these stages translate into a process that goes something like this. Bales of wood pulp are fed into a hydrapulper, in which the pulp is diluted with water and mixed – think of a hydrapulper as a giant Moulinex, and the pulp as paper-gruel. The porridge-like substance produced – the ‘stock’ or ‘stuff’ – can then be further diluted and undergo further beating, or fibrillation, to cut and break up the fibres of the pulp, and screened to remove impurities, and blended with various additives. Then, and only then, is the stuff ready for the papermaking machine proper. A typical modern machine is mind-bogglingly huge: hundreds of metres long, costing millions, running twenty-four hours a day and capable of producing hundreds of thousands of tonnes of paper every year. The slurry, or stock – which looks like milk at this stage, or at least a kind of thin white water – passes through a ‘flow box’ or ‘head box’, where it is sprayed onto a mesh conveyor belt. As the stock is sprayed, the water drains through the mesh, leaving behind a fibrous mat, just as in the early Japanese hand moulds, only on a massive scale, and at astonishing speed. The stuff then passes through heavy rollers, with more moisture being squeezed and sucked out, and beneath a dandy roll, and through steam-heated drying