Papyrus, parchment, and paper

This category covers the manufactured flexible sheet made to be written or printed on and carried, together with the pulp and rag stock it is made from. Three materials occupy it — papyrus, parchment and vellum, and paper — and they have nothing in common except the function. They are one commodity because they competed directly for the same buyers in the same market, and because each displaced its predecessor on price.

The three processes are unrelated, and the differences explain the economics. Papyrus is a laminate: pith cut from the sedge in strips, laid in two crossed layers, pressed and dried. Parchment is skin — limed, dehaired, stretched on a frame under tension, scraped thin, and dried still under tension. It is emphatically not tanned, and that is why it is stiff, why it cockles in damp, and why it can be scraped and written over again as a palimpsest. Paper is a slurry of macerated fiber drained on a screen, the mat pressed and dried. Each step in that sequence moved the material further from a particular place and closer to a factory: papyrus was bound to a river, parchment to a herd, and paper to whatever fiber happened to be cheap.

Papyrus is attested as a written-on commodity from the Wadi al-Jarf papyri — the Diary of Merer, from Khufu's twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh regnal years, excavated by Pierre Tallet in 2013 and the oldest known papyri bearing text. Uninscribed rolls are reported from earlier contexts. The commodity fact about papyrus is geographic: it grew in Egypt and was exported from Egypt, so the entire literate Mediterranean bought its writing surface from one country, which is as near to a single-source dependency in a universal necessity as the ancient world managed.

Parchment, in use from the second century BCE and dominant in the Latin West from late antiquity, replaced that dependency with a different one. Because the sheet was skin, the production of text was limited by livestock. The Codex Amiatinus, made at Wearmouth-Jarrow before 716, runs to over a thousand leaves and required more than five hundred animals; it weighs some seventy-five pounds and its spine is nearly a foot thick. That is the real reason books were rare: not scribal labor alone but the herd behind every volume. A scriptorium's output was capped by agriculture.

Paper lifted the cap twice. It reached Europe through al-Andalus and Italy and had displaced parchment for most purposes by the fifteenth century — before printing rather than because of it, though printing made the displacement irreversible. Then its own raw material changed. Until the nineteenth century paper was rag paper, which means the paper trade was a trade in textile waste and the ragpicker was its supply chain. Friedrich Keller patented a machine for grinding wood into pulp in Germany in 1844 and sold the patent to Henry Voelter's Sons, who used the pulp to make newspaper; the demand driving it was the daily press, and printers who at first resisted wood paper accepted it once it proved to take ink well on a fast press. The substrate's raw material thus went from cloth to trees inside a single generation.

The significance of the category is that the sheet limits the administration. A chancery, a double-entry ledger, a court of record, a joint-stock register, and a newspaper all run on it, and the quantity available sets a ceiling on how much any state or firm can write down and therefore on how much it can govern or own. Three successive substitutions, each cheaper than the last, each raised that ceiling. The boundaries follow from the form: the line is the portable sheet, so a shaped clay tablet is ceramic once fired and inscribed stone is rocks, sand, and gravel. Skins delivered to the parchmenter are hides and feathers, while the finished sheet is here, and a vellum binding is a leather good by the article rule even though the leaves inside it are not. Inks are colorants, the timber behind wood pulp is timber, and a newspaper considered as content is news while the newsprint it is on is here.