Joshua Calhoun can tell you exactly where it started: Among the shelves in a used bookstore near his hometown in the Adirondack Mountains of New York.
That’s where Calhoun, an associate professor of English, first fell in love with used books—and with paper, the ubiquitous substance from which they’re made.
“There’s something about that smell, that texture,” says Calhoun, a nature-lover who spent this summer sheltering in his family home in the Adirondacks. “For me, the next step is that it comes to identify you. It says something about who you think you are.”
For Calhoun, that something is more than just a lover of books and a professor who teaches Shakespeare to undergraduates. It’s also someone driven to understand human beings' need to record and preserve their thoughts—and the impact the ecology of handmade paper has had on that process. It’s a topic he explores through the lens of history in The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England, his debut book that was published earlier this year.
“Why do we so value taking ideas and making them into a format that can be shared with others?” asks Calhoun. “Why does that matter to us? And how does it work? I’m writing to tell the story of paper in a different way.”
Most people, for instance, aren’t aware that paper only began being made from trees after the American Civil War. Prior to that, it was largely made from rags of recycled clothing, which were, in turn, made from plants and other resources that, depending on who you were and where you lived, weren’t always abundant or even available.
“Paper doesn’t just exist,” explains Calhoun. “The story of paper is the story of natural resource scarcity, often due to overuse. It’s a history of sacrifice, too, of haves and have-nots and of hidden labor.”
That history, says Calhoun, is dotted with stories of fates impacted by the substances on which people chose to write things down. Thomas Jefferson, drawing on indigenous writing technologies, suggested that the legendary explorers Lewis and Clark keep a second copy of their journals on birch bark to take advantage of the wood’s waterproof qualities.
We may not always think about what our paper is made from, but we do tend to think about paper as having significance and personality when compared to other substances, says Calhoun.
“The choice to write on paper instead of parchment in 1620 isn’t so different from the decision to email your grandmother rather than writing to her on paper in 2020—the medium is meaningful.”
While he’s always loved books, Calhoun’s interest in the process of making paper was sparked in graduate school, through his participation in a summer public engagement program at the University of Delaware that focused on material culture. He created a rudimentary papermaking workshop, asking participants to bring an old garment that held personal significance, looking to amplify the human connection to paper and to the historical materials used to make it.
The spirit of that experience exists today as part of Holding History, a free public humanities program Calhoun co-founded in 2015 and co-directs at UW-Madison that holds similar interactive events centered on the history of books and media. One of the most popular of those events is—you guessed it—a papermaking workshop Calhoun and local papermaker Robert Possehl set up each year for students on Library Mall. It’s designed to get students thinking about the physical connections they have with paper.
“When you actually look at paper and how it’s made, you can see evidence of other stories embedded in the sheet—plants, river silt, insects,” says Calhoun.
Having explored the rich origins of paper and books, Calhoun has now turned his attention to uncovering the other end of the ecological spectrum—how they die, and the environmental and financial expenses we incur to slow that process. Through his affiliate appointment with the UW-Madison Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, Calhoun is actively working with the Currie Lab in the department of Bacteriology, examining the microbial life of paper. As part of that collaboration, Calhoun and research specialist Caitlin Carlson used parts of pages from the first “old” book he ever purchased at that used bookstore he frequented in his childhood—an 1828 copy of George Barrell Cheever's The American Common-place Book of Prose: a Collection of Eloquent And Interesting Extracts From the Writings of American Authors—to revive long -dormant microbes in the paper.
Calhoun was also inspired by a summer visit to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, where he and other researchers in the library’s reading room had to bundle up in sweaters and jackets to ward off the air-conditioned chill necessary to slow and prevent the decay of centuries-old texts. For Calhoun, it raised another key question.
“How do you justify spending these resources to preserve everything?” asks Calhoun. “How much is enough? And how do I justify what I keep?”
The knee-jerk answer, or course, is to digitize everything, but, as with paper, that approach carries hidden and not-so-hidden costs: Massive computer servers consume large amounts of electricity and must be kept cool, just like ancient texts.
“It’s a question of preserving our cultural heritage versus irresponsibly hoarding things,” muses Calhoun. “As a book-lover, I don’t like the question, but it’s one we’re going to have to answer.”