Paper and Time
Like everybody I am currently stuck at home at the end of a long lockdown. My research is about the home. I’m interested in the way that seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europeans used the material culture around them to experiment and learn about the natural world. In a book called Thrifty Science I argued that domestic experimenting with food, fabrics, and other everyday materials is one of the origins of modern science (Werrett, 2019). What I want to do in this short essay is use my own home to generate historical questions. I will walk around my home looking at materials and reflect on them in relation to time and temporality. Hopefully this will raise interesting questions that I can then explore from a historical perspective: a kind of domestic anthropology which does not require much in terms of resources and travel. One of my concerns in doing this is environmental: I want to know how we can make a more sustainable culture. The pandemic has challenged us to think of new ways of working and staying at home is actually quite a good way to achieve more sustainable research. The material culture that surrounds us is enough to at least begin to ask interesting historical questions.
The material I shall focus on is paper, a ubiquitous substance in the home. The presence of paper in the kitchen makes this apparent. In one corner of my kitchen, under a counter, is a plastic container full of recyclable paper. There are egg cartons, the remains of paper packaging for a pie, a cardboard envelope for a book sent by post and the instructions for medications printed on paper and included in every box of pills. What I imagine is going to happen with all these things is that these different papers with their different purposes are ultimately going to be reduced to a common denominator: a pulp which will be reconstituted as a new kind of paper and then put to use again. Every day I add items to this collection with a sense of the future implicit in my actions. Anticipation of future use is making paper move around my kitchen in a particular way. I also know that the paper might just end up in a landfill somewhere, having never been recycled. I act nevertheless in the hope that this is not true. The paper in this bin resides there owing to an anticipatory mixture of hope, perhaps naive optimism, and anxiety.
Next to the recycling bin is a bin for regular rubbish, a chrome metal cylinder with a plastic binbag inside it that contains various unpleasant kitchen wastes. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas put it in her groundbreaking study on pollution and taboo this is “matter out of place” and unlike the recycled paper I don’t think much about its future (Douglas, 2002). I couldn’t say where I imagine it will go and my main concern is geographical not temporal: that is, can I get it out of the house? There may be some paper inside this bin that should be in the recycling bin and is therefore in the wrong place but this is the extent of my geographical anxiety. Recycling bins are about time, and rubbish bins are about space.
Moving up to a long flat counter above the bins, at one end there are two small boxes made of paper. One of them is a green cardboard box for a “fixed fire rated downlighter”, that is, a light fitting for my attic. I put this box here several months ago after new lights were installed to remember which fitting was used. So this paper is a record, and as such it was never put in the recycling. Unfortunately boxes are not typical archival material, and this one lingers between use and disposal, as I’m unsure where it ought to go. The box is caught in a classificatory and temporal ambiguity and as a result it sits gathering dust. I’m not sure what will happen to it. Perhaps when I move house it will get put in the recycling bin and then its temporality will be decided. Temporality around objects can be hazy.
Next to the light fixture box is a carton of long life whole milk made of navy blue-coloured glossy cardboard with a white plastic lid. We bought this carton of milk and a few others to store in case there was a shortage of milk owing to the lockdown and pandemic. There wasn’t, and as we’ve never really liked the taste of long-life milk this one may end up getting poured down the sink. Even though we’ll recycle the carton, the contents will be discarded: a contradiction? The temporality of this milk carton is owing to a very complex situation that doesn’t normally occur: in this household it’s an exceptional object at an exceptional time. This reminds me of the art of Cornelia Parker, who often presents items that seem mundane and everyday, yet have an extraordinary backstory or exist within a surprising context (Parker, 1996). An ordinary slipper sits in a display case, with a small label. Upon closer inspection the label says the slipper belonged to a person who spontaneously combusted, and indeed there is a slightly browned edge to the top of the slipper, hinting at the object’s unique past.
Anticipation of the future does much to shape the paper in my kitchen. Passing over a roll of kitchen paper which is resting behind the lightfitting box I move to three cardboard cylindrical containers of coffee and hot chocolate, all with plastic lids. These, like the long life milk carton, are designed to make different substances endure for a certain period of time by protecting them from moisture and microbes. The containers are also carriers of text: small print on the base tells me that the milk will last until August 2021 and the hot chocolate powder will last until January 2022. A container of coffee whitener lasted only until September 2020 which means that it is out of date and needs to be thrown out. I hadn’t noticed this and the date makes me feel I should act to remove this overly decayed object from the kitchen (though the paper and contents don’t look decayed). Now a failure in the past is attached to this paper container. Maybe it will be redeemed by successful recycling in the future. Let’s hope I remember to throw it away.
It would take many thousands of words to get to the other end of the kitchen counter as there are so many different paper artefacts that reside on it. Time in this sense is a commodity that is too precious to spend on describing every single item made of paper. It’s sufficient to note the abundance and complexity of papers and temporalities that could be discussed.
If I turn around and walk into the living room an entirely different culture of paper appears which has completely different temporalities to the papers in the kitchen. In fact I’m struck by how much changes with a couple of steps from one room into another. Now I’m sitting at a table in the “living room” surrounded by bookshelves, cupboards and drawers. Being an academic household there are many books. Given that academic readers tend to be quite aware of the nature of paper in books I will pass over them to a more interesting (for me at any rate) paper presence in the room. My hobby is collecting comics, the throwaway kids’ entertainment that flourished in the last century and was a staple of childhood when I was growing up. There are a number of boxes in this room (and dotted around the house) containing old comics. Collecting comics is an exercise in managing paper and time. The goal is to find and own paper commodities which are, like their collectors, in a state of decay. Because comics were ephemera, never designed to last, they were made with cheap paper which deteriorates quickly. Collecting is partly an effort to delay that deterioration and I am surrounded by some of these efforts in this room. My wife Anna disagrees. For her, comics are there to be read, and the condition is not relevant, as long as they are legible. Accesibility of information takes priority for her, while I am more worried about the material preservation of the objects (and don’t read a fragile comic).
The methods of preservation are quite involved. The first way damage is avoided is by using acid free containers, boxes with lids and holes that serve as handles that contain a couple of hundred comics each. One in front of me sits on a shelf and is inscribed “American/ Gold/ Silver/ Bronze 5”. Collectors have named the different eras when the comics were produced after precious metals (the older golden age being better than the silver age, etc). Inside the boxes each comic is placed on an acid-free card “board” and slipped inside a clear plastic bag which is taped at the back. I am told as a member of the community of collectors that this is the best way to preserve comics. One occasionally hears of collections from the 1940s and 50s which were stored in brown paper bags and which seemed to have lasted very well over the decades so maybe in the plastic option is not as necessary as it’s presented, but I take their word for it. Certainly there’s a horrible mismatch between my concern to recycle paper in the kitchen and lack of concern over using hundreds of small plastic bags in the living room.
At any rate, inside these plastic bags are a large number of comics which are gradually deteriorating (hopefully not too fast) in interesting chemical ways. One problem is tanning – the browning of paper due to the exposure of lignin to air and sunlight. Lignin comes from wood pulp, and has been present in cheap paper since the nineteenth century. Older papers were made from linen, which lasts much longer and doesn’t go brown so quickly. Paper is made of cellulose chains which make up fibers, and longer fibers make more durable paper. Linen rag-based paper has long fibers, wood pulp paper has short fibers. Acid, or pollutants in the air, or sunlight break up the fibers, which manifests as deterioration (Roberts, 1996). Comic collectors have a sophisticated vocabulary to describe this process because the degree of tanning affects the value of the comic (Overstreet, 2012). One can send comics to the “Certified Guaranty Company” or “CGC” in Florida which will provide a grade indicating the condition of a comic. The comic is placed inside a plastic container (more plastic, never far from paper it seems), with a label that indicates the grade and the comic’s page colour. This matters when comics change hands for sometimes many thousands or even millions of dollars. Paper can be “white”, “off-white”, various shades of “tan”, “brown”, and when it’s really deteriorated it becomes “brittle”, which most collectors would avoid. This vocabulary emerged as comics increased in value to the point where it actually mattered quite a lot. Online discussion boards are filled with debates over how much “page quality” matters for collectors. Paper and time is a topic of enormous interest and economic import (though not for everyone).
Collectors lament the ageing of paper, but the ageing of furniture or of paintings is often seen as adding to their value. Looking elsewhere in the living room I see wooden furniture whose age and wear is considered part of its charm. The aesthetics of time are quite different for different materials. Other paper artefacts in this room include pictures on the wall, labels on bottles of wine and spirits, letters and envelopes, and cardboard boxes containing cans of soup, beans, etc. in light of the pandemic, again something we don’t normally have in the living room.
I could move into other rooms, each with a different paper culture. There are rooms where paper is scarce, like the bathroom, where the humidity would be damaging to paper. Plastic rules in the bathroom. The exception is toilet paper, a phenomenon of the lockdown, when people, including us, hoarded the stuff out of a fear it would sell out (which it did, briefly, precisely because of people’s hording response). Once again, tremendous amounts of anticipation and anxiety surround paper in a domestic setting. Another site of concern in the pandemic has been the hallway, as a place for paper that comes in from outside (letters, parcels) and so raises questions of hygiene, quarantine, safety, etc. The hall leading to the front door was a liminal space where we kept letters to be indoors (not out in the rain) but not so indoors that they might contaminate us. We kept them there for three days before we considered them safe to be opened and brought into other rooms.
This brief foray into domestic anthropology opens up a range of historical questions about materials and time. First of all paper is a material whose temporality is both physical in the sense of it being subject to deterioration or preservation and imaginary in the sense of evoking and being understood through various anticipations and suppositions about the past and the future. The two are interlinked. What I think has happened to paper and what is going to happen to paper do a lot to shape what kinds of paper are in the home, where they reside, and how they endure. The historical question would be, has this always been the case (at least while there has been paper in the home), and how does this temporality of past and future imaginaries change over time? How do different types of paper with different properties fit with different imaginaries? Whose imaginaries mattered to decide the fate of the paper objects? What behaviours have been driven by or shaped paper through these anticipations and records and memories? Seventeenth-century academics began to fear that discarding papers would lead to loss. The French librarian Gabriel Naudé, whose work inspired the collecting practices of the Royal Society, begged his readers not to neglect paper fragments for fear of scholarly loss,
such as are Libels, Placarts, Theses, Fragments, Proofs, and the like, which one ought carefully to unite, and gather according to Titles, and subjects… Otherwise, it ordinarily comes to pass, that whilst we despise these little Books, which appear onely as me[re] baubles, and pieces of no consideration, we happen to lose a world of rare collections, and such as are sometimes the most curious pieces of the whole Library (Naudé, 1661, p. 57).
Anxieties and anticipations accumulate around many types of paper, such as wallpaper, toilet paper, and wrapping paper (Podgorny, 2020; Hawksley, 2016). Where do such imaginaries come from? My assumptions about whether or not paper will be recycled and where this will happen depend on a great variety of representations in media, academic literature, and conversations with various persons, all of which has a history. What contexts was Naudé informed by? Individual imaginaries about paper are shaped by collective ones. Every piece of paper sits in a context of society, knowledge and mediation.
A second consideration is the contradictory and messy nature of these things. Most paper in my home will disappear, decay and deteriorate and won’t be available for historians to ponder (if there are any historians in the future). There may be lucky finds, like the fragments of seventeenth-century paper labels and doodles found under the floorboards of Oxford’s Museum of the History of Science during archaeological excavations in the 1990s (Bennett et al, 2000). But the main event is oblivion. Historical sense is equally precarious. If I was to try to interpret the forms of paper and practises surrounding them in my home it certainly wouldn’t be enough to say I was e.g. an early twenty-first century male academic with environmental anxieties and a collecting habit, because one only needs to move around a metre or so in one room to find contradictions and inconsistencies over, for example, whether I use materials sustainably or not. What is apparent is that a great many emotional and ethical concerns, values, hopes, fears, worries, pleasures, and anxieties are shaping paper practises in my home. Materials exist within overlapping and contradictory moral economies much concerned with time and temporality and which are constantly changing. I would like to know what forms of sin and salvation, what hopes and fears, informed the imaginaries of e.g. householders in the past: What shaped their materials, and their practices around materials?
A third and final question would concern how these paper forms and practises have shaped my own and other people’s identities and temporalities. Materials which are recycled or which endure thanks to clever packaging do so because people want to survive longer or prosper or become more healthy etc. Our bodies and states of mind change over time depending on what paper can do for us in the home and elsewhere. How historically did paper affect bodies and health, identities and emotional states in the home? Historians have asked such questions of paper and gender, with fascinating results (Bittel et al, 2019). The seventeenth-century English writer Richard Braithwaite mocked women for wearing clothes so full of paper that they were little else, “embrace her, and she is nought but past-boord, canvas, & whalebone, with which all the body of her gowne… is stuft, to repaire the faults of her proportion; and when she goes to bed, she leaves upon the table (at her beds-feet) halfe of her person in putting of her Cloths” (Braithwaite, 1640, p. 314). Making people paper might be a way to trivialize them, or to build them up. We are, in various ways, made by the paper in our lives and in our homes, as fixed inside imaginaries of past and future anxieties and expectations as the egg cartons and printed instructions residing in the recycling bin.
Bibliography
Bennett, J. A., S. A. Johnston, A. V. Simcock. 2000. Solomon’s House in Oxford: New Finds from the First Museum (Oxford: Museum of the History of Science).
Bittel, Carla, Elaine Leong and Christine van Oertzen, eds. 2019. Working with Paper: Gendered Practices in the History of Knowledge (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press).
Brathwaite, Richard. 1640. Ar’t Asleepe Husband? A Boulster Lecture; Stored with all Variety of Witty Jeasts, Merry Tales, and Other Pleasant Passages (London).
Douglas, Mary. 2002. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Conception of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge Classics).
Hawksley, Lucinda. 2016. Bitten By Witch Fever: Wallpaper & Arsenic in the Victorian Home (London: Thames and Hudson).
Naudé, Gabriel. 1661. Instructions Concerning Erecting of a Library, trans. John Evelyn (London).
Overstreet, Robert M. 2012. The Overstreet Guide to Collecting Comics (Maryland: Gemstone Publishing).
Parker, Cornelia. 1996. Avoided Object (Cardiff: Chapter).
Podgorny, Irina. 2020. “A Story About (Toilet) Paper,” Teach 311+Covid-19, online translation of an article in Spanish, accessed April 18, 2021 << https://www.teach311.org/2020/04/09/a-story-about-toilet-paper/ >>
Roberts, J. C. 1996. The Chemistry of Paper (Cambridge: Royal Society of Chemistry).
Werrett, Simon. 2019. Thrifty Science: Making the Most of Materials in the History of Experiment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

