CHAPTER IV: WOODEN PAPER 



Once upon a time paper grew on trees, and within the past 

 quarter of a century the world has turned again to the forests 

 as the source of its supply. Thin sheets of the inner bark of 

 birch in America and Europe, and of the paper mulberry in 

 Asiatic countries preserved the crude characters by which primitive 

 peoples expressed themselves. The names — beech, heece, hoc, 

 bok, buch, hook — link the past with the present in the races sprung 

 from Teutonic stock. They sent messages from tribe to tribe 

 written in symbols on thin beechen boards — their first written 

 communications. Afterward, the old Scandinavian and Icelandic 

 runes were written on the same sort of wood, and many boards 

 constituted a book. The word "liber," Latin for "book," is the 

 name of the inner bark of trees; in botany the term has always 

 been used. The word "library," therefore, has a long and 

 interesting pedigree. 



The reed, papyrus, was harvested for paper in the days of 

 antiquity, along the banks of the river Nile. Thin sheets of the 

 pith of this slender plant formed the books of early Egypt. 

 Libraries of these ancient writings were preserved in the Pyramids. 

 The narrow, thin strips of pith were joined by overlapping their 

 margins and by lining each sheet thus formed with a similar 

 one whose strips were at right angles with the strips of the 

 first one. The two sheets, made one by pressure, formed a 

 page beside which the boards of the beechen books seem very 

 clumsy indeed. 



The fibres of cotton, wool, flax, and silk, gathered as rags, 

 cleaned, bleached and shredded, furnished the better qualities 

 of paper in later times. They still do. But such paper is ex- 

 pensive. The crude materials cannot be gathered in sufficient 

 quantity to supply the demand for it. Straw, hemp and other 

 grass fibres serve for paper of coarse grades. 



To-day, as of old, our paper grows on trees, for nothing has 

 been discovered to substitute for rags; so wooden paper, not so 

 good, but the best thing so far to be had, has come to fill the 



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