Mammocks

A lovely word, mammocks – ‘a scrap, shred, broken or torn piece’ (Oxford English Dictionary) which I owe to a Bookforum review of Ian Sansom’s 2013 book ‘Paper: An Elegy’.
‘Not quite a history, Paper feels more like a commonplace book, one of those predigital scrapbooks of items jotted down for future reference…… a magpie collector of shiny bits of information’ – one of which is that the first fully automated paper machine was set up at Frogmore Mill in Hertfordshire in 1803.

Just over 200 years. Everything before that was hand-made, from all sorts of materials including rags.
‘Paper made by hand from pulped rags has a different texture from machine-made paper manufactured from wood-pulp. Paper usually accounted for at least half the manufacturing cost of a book…. and it figured prominently in advertisements for books since readers cared about the material base of literature – its colour, density and feel to the fingertips.’
(The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age – Pettergree & der Weduwen)

It still matters to some of us. To many of us, if you count the number of bookbinding and paper making sites on Instagram, like a defiant resistance to an automated world. And as for our machine-made paper, some lasts and some doesn’t, mostly depending on the amount of acid in the mix, since it’s the acid that causes the foxing (spots) and browning. The photo above shows a stack of poetry books, all published in the four years from 1982 to 1985 (the years when I was first buying poetry).Those produced by Bloodaxe, Faber and Carcanet stand up pretty well, still more or less white. Books from Cape and Penguin have on the whole fared far less well: brown, rougher to the touch, more brittle. It remains to be seen which of the current slim volumes will look good in forty years time. They all look great when you buy them.

And as a matter of interest, the books in the stack are, from top to bottom –
Douglas Dunn: Elegies, Faber, 1985.
Elizabeth Jennings: Selected Poems, Carcanet, 1985.
Ken Smith: The Poet Reclining: Bloodaxe, 1982.
Peter Didsbury: The Butchers of Hull, Bloodaxe, 1982.
Carolyn Forche: the country between us, Cape, 1983.
Tony Harrison: Selected Poems, Penguin, 1985.
The Penguin Book of Contemporary Poetry, 1982