The Paper Trail

February 22, 2016
In this well-researched history, Monro (China: City and Exile), a British reporter who has written extensively on China, digs into the long and complicated evolution of paper and its effects on civilization. “This is the story of how that soft and supple substance became the vehicle of history and the conduit for landmark innovations and mass movements across the world,” he writes. Monro begins with paper’s emergence in ancient China, and as he chronicles how paper supplanted other forms of writing material, he follows the trail of art, literature, religion, and politics across the course of centuries and continents. His primary focus is on how paper affected Chinese culture, but as the technology spreads to other countries, he studies those trails as well, leading to tangents on the printing press, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and more. Religion plays a large role, with the Bible, the Qur’an, and Buddhist texts finding widespread audiences thanks to the portable, convenient medium. Monro finishes by acknowledging the power of the book itself and how “paper’s greatest role has been as courier of books to individual owner-readers.” The result is an engaging, lively, informative examination of a ubiquitous resource and its multimillennia influence on the world. Agent: Patrick Walsh, Conville and Walsh Literary.

January 15, 2016
From China to Eurasia to Europe, how paper profoundly changed culture. In his debut history, former Parliamentary researcher Monro (editor: China: City and Exile, 2011) traces the invention, spread, and impact of papermaking from its origin in ancient China. A journalist who served as a news and features reporter for Reuters Shanghai, among many other publications, the author draws upon a deep background in Chinese history and impressive research in this dense study of not only paper, but also the development of writing and literacy. Writing, he says, began in Sumer, in Mesopotamia, site of the "first known extensive use of the wheel, irrigation, the plough and the arch." In order to keep records and accounts, Sumerians created signs and then images that represented sounds. The invention of a phonetic form of communication was "a groundbreaking innovation," to be sure, but because Sumerians wrote on clay tablets, their communication could not travel far. Egyptians adopted writing by the late 3200s B.C.E., making their messages more portable by inscribing them on papyrus, sheets pounded from the papyrus leaf; Monro distinguishes papyrus from parchment, made from animal hides. In China, bamboo "turned plants into the surface of knowledge" and led to "an outpouring of history writing as well as bureaucratic records." Silk, too, was favored, until an inventor mixed bark, hemp, rags, and flax with water, mashed them to a pulp, and hung them to dry. Gradually, the technique moved from China to Korea and Japan, where papermaking "became an art form," and then to Arabia, where paper spurred the development of the Quran from oral recitation to sacred book. In the 1150s, paper was imported to Europe from the Middle East, but its use was not widespread for 100 years. In the 15th century, Gutenberg invented a press suitably strong for thick, rag-based European paper. Illuminating, richly detailed history.

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Starred review from April 1, 2016

Reporter and former Parliamentary researcher Monro's history of paper is impressive in breadth and depth. Covering 2,000 years and several continents, Monro proves that it's salutary to remember all of the things paper still does for us in addition to the changes its deployment has caused in multiple societies throughout the centuries. With elegant prose, the author details the agents of change in this nearly multimillennium process. There are papermakers, calligraphers, and alphabet creators as well as the inventors and modifiers of block print, as the author discusses the Buddhist monks who chose papyrus over silk or bamboo as the medium for their proselytizing in China, the spread of print across the Islamic world, the popularity of Gutenberg's printing press, Martin Luther's Bible, and Denis Diderot's Republic of Letters, and even English coffeehouses of the 18th and 19th centuries. Monro has sage observations to make on each of these subjects. VERDICT With The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Elizabeth Eisenstein wrote about the transformative influence of printing; Monro eloquently makes the same case for paper. This may become the go-to book on the history of paper for history lovers of all persuasion. [See Prepub Alert, 8/31/15.]--David Keymer, Modesto, CA

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2015

Paper was invented in China 2,000 years ago, and nothing has been the same since. British author Monro, who is intimately familiar with China, having studied and worked there for years, takes us from paper's first rough creation, polishing up in the second century CE; key use in disseminating religious belief; and role in helping launch the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution, all the way up to the digital era. Obviously for book lovers.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2016

Reporter and former Parliamentary researcher Monro's history of paper is impressive in breadth and depth. Covering 2,000 years and several continents, Monro proves that it's salutary to remember all of the things paper still does for us in addition to the changes its deployment has caused in multiple societies throughout the centuries. With elegant prose, the author details the agents of change in this nearly multimillennium process. There are papermakers, calligraphers, and alphabet creators as well as the inventors and modifiers of block print, as the author discusses the Buddhist monks who chose papyrus over silk or bamboo as the medium for their proselytizing in China, the spread of print across the Islamic world, the popularity of Gutenberg's printing press, Martin Luther's Bible, and Denis Diderot's Republic of Letters, and even English coffeehouses of the 18th and 19th centuries. Monro has sage observations to make on each of these subjects. VERDICT With The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Elizabeth Eisenstein wrote about the transformative influence of printing; Monro eloquently makes the same case for paper. This may become the go-to book on the history of paper for history lovers of all persuasion. [See Prepub Alert, 8/31/15.]--David Keymer, Modesto, CA

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.