With fourteen essays from nineteen contributors and a comprehensive introduction and epilogue, this illustrated volume was borne out of a two-day conference in 2019 of the same name with a mission to focus on the least examined aspect of paper: its trade in the early modern age. The lack of a more cohesive picture of the paper trade may seem surprising, given that it was a costly but increasingly utilized material in the early modern period. Reasons for this deficiency are woven through the essays as case studies that span some five hundred years.
In his introduction, Daniel Bellingradt sets out the arguments for approaching the history of paper and its use from the perspective of trade, shifting away from but not excluding the traditional emphasis on the history of the book. In having that particular focus, he argues, we have gained little sense of the dynamics and organization of the paper industry. Where did paper come from, and who moved and sold it? With this quest to change the emphasis and lay the foundation for a historiography of paper, the essays explore the paper trade through the three main themes of the subtitle: practices, materials, and networks. Their methodology opens up a wider European geographic area than is normally included in studies of paper history, drawing focus to the need, consumption, and use of paper in those areas. This approach has also been taken with the trade in early modern artists’ materials, encountering the same obstacles but with equally valuable results.
Most of the book's contributors are book historians, so the content is still tied to print and publishing. Yet this eclectic set of essays also brings in different viewpoints by including scholars of communication and the digital humanities as well as literature, science, and technology. Framing paper within its trade rather than solely its manufacture and end product, the resulting essays map the journey of paper and those involved in its story through those networks more comprehensively, from raw materials to use.
Drawing on a wide range of documentary material and including large-scale databases, most essays are geographically located case studies, making comparisons of themes and findings more possible. While these essays can stand alone, taken as a whole they start to reveal common themes and recurring patterns, which in turn begin to provide foundational information on the networks and flows of paper. The interconnectedness of those involved, often with multiple roles, is one such recurrent thread. A common refrain is the multiple roles of singular players. In an essay on the paper supply for Dirk Martens's printing house, Renaud Adam notes that the sixteenth-century Ghent printer Pieter de Keyser was also a mill owner, bookbinder, and bookseller. Trade in paper as singular or multiple sheets was also carried out by spicers, apothecaries, grocers, and stationers, as well as printers and paper makers. This potential confusion illustrates why it is problematic to work out who did what, when, and how.
Like most source research, the best results come from areas where there is a good corpus from which to gather information, creating patterns of distribution and use to build a more generic picture of the paper trade in early modern Europe. Jean-Benoît Krumenacker's essay, examining the accounts of the Lyon consulate from 1450 to 1525, is not the only one to incorporate a watermark study, but it demonstrates the usefulness of such studies in revealing patterns of use of paper stock and the scale of distribution, with findings that could potentially make connections across different uses of the same paper type. In other highlights, Anna Reynold's chapter on book bindings and the wastepaper trade in early modern England and Scotland is particularly illuminating. Simon Burrows et al. focus their attention on digital and archival sources relating to the business of a single publishing house, revealing its patterns of supply and consumption.
Evidence concerning supply and distribution, availability, cost, quality, and value of paper is also significant for early modern artists and workshops, but is not covered in this volume. Although the geographical paper lineage of early modern drawings is harder to trace, the findings in these essays are a rich font of information on the availability and use of paper, with the potential to provide information on the source of paper for artists and their workshops.
If I have one grumble about this impressive collection, it is the quality of many of the ninety-one images, with some too dark to render them legible. With a wealth of references and a useful bibliography, the essays tell a story of an invaluable commodity, reflecting the global reach of the medium of paper and providing a collection of data that becomes a significant foundation on which to build further.
