Paper by Ian Sansom

Paper by Ian Sansom

From the author of The Bad Book Affair comes a witty, personal, and entertaining meditation on the history and significance of paper--an international cultural study and a series of personal reflections on the meaning of this essential product.

Let us suppose for a moment that paper were to disappear. Would anything be lost? Everything would be lost.

Paper surrounds us. Not only as books, letters and diaries, but as beer mats and birth certificates, board games and business cards, fireworks and flypaper, photographs and playing cards, tickets and tea bags. We are paper people.

But the age of paper is coming to an end. E-books regularly outsell physical books. E-tickets replace the paper variety. Archives are digitized. The world we know was made from paper, and yet everywhere we look, paper is beginning to disappear. As we enter a world beyond paper, Ian Sansom explores the paradoxes of the greatest of man-made materials and shows how some kinds of paper, and the ghosts and shadows of paper, will always be with us.

Paper: An Elegy is a history of paper in all its forms and functions. Both a cultural study and a series of personal reflections on the meaning of paper, this book is a timely meditation on the very paper it is printed on.

Sansom's tour through the "Paper Museum" reveals the unexpected stories behind:

• A History of Technology: From ancient Chinese papermaking techniques to the "metallic necessity" of the modern paper mill, discover how this seemingly simple product became a miracle of inscrutable intricacy.
• The Power of Maps: Explore how paper maps, from sixteenth-century atlases to modern "Walking Papers," have been used to define territories, build empires, and wage war.
• Paper Money and Power: Uncover the story of how flimsy paper currency, adorned with the "façade of hell," came to underpin the entire modern economy and fuel both booms and busts.
• The Secret Life of Paper: A surprising journey into the worlds of paper clothing, murderous wallpaper, complex origami, and the thousands of other everyday items that prove we are, and always will be, paper people.

Ian Sansom is the author of the novel series Mobile Library and County Guides. He contributes to the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Spectator, and is a regular on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4. He resides in the county of Down.