Paper Quotes

“Writing beautifully—calligraphy—was China’s first graphic art form. Although elsewhere in the world people drew first and learned to write later, in China, the reverse was true. First you learned to write beautifully, and then you painted. After mastering those twin skills, you could move on to writing poetry, but many chose to remain just calligraphers, a highly appreciated art form in China. Another”
― Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History

“The American Wasps form very fine paper, like ours; they extract the fiber of common wood of the countries where they live. They teach us that paper can be made from the fiber of plants without the use of rags and linen.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History

“Ironically, the Italians, the inventors of Roman numerals, took a great leap forward in business and mathematics when they became the first in Christian Europe to abandon the Roman system and use Hindu/Arabic numbers.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History

“The Greeks and Romans also sometimes used metallic lead to write or draw on papyrus, which is the origin of the modern expression “lead pencil”—despite the fact that a modern pencil contains no lead.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History

“But as soon as paper started to be made from trees, concern shifted to the destruction of the forests.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History

“The finished paper is still 5 percent water.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History

“The oldest-known permanent photograph, an image of a man leading a horse, dates from 1825.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History

“Michelangelo used a great deal of paper, in part because he considered himself as much a poet as an artist. Between five hundred and six hundred sheets of Michelangelo’s drawings have survived, and written on many are poems, personal letters, notes, and details about finances. Almost any piece of paper he used contained a few sketches. A few are finished drawings. A stunning drawing of the resurrection of Christ is also marked with a shopping list. Masterful drawings were folded up, with notes about the banal ephemera of everyday life jotted on the reverse side. Rarely is there a single drawing on a sheet. He also wrote some three hundred poems, invented dialogues, theoretical essays, proposals, and outlines for essays on art theory, including a response to Dürer’s Four Books on Human Proportion. But most of this paper was not intended for anyone else to see, and before his death he attempted to destroy as much of it as he could.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History

“the four great inventions—paper, compass, gunpowder, and printing”
― Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History

“In 1928, Celulosa Cubana, S.A., founded by sugar tycoon Manuel Rionda, began making bagasse paper in Tuinucu, Cuba.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History

“Europe needed printing because it was bursting with creativity. New ideas in the arts and sciences, as well as in social justice and religion, desperately needed to be expressed and disseminated. The Chinese and Muslim eras of innovation were mostly behind them.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History

“And another small point, or two actually; Aldus was the first to use the modern semicolon.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History

“Europeans started wearing linen underwear instead of wool. There is no record indicating that this made the Europeans less irritable, but it did make a lot more rags available.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History

“The configuration of the keyboard was then changed, based on letter usage in the English language, to avoid jams. That is why a is below q and above z, and why c is straddled by x and”
― Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History

“But Joseph Niépce was forgotten. He had the distinction of authoring two of the most important inventions of the nineteenth century, the internal combustion engine and the photograph, without ever becoming famous. Once again, history shows that creating important inventions and becoming a “famous inventor” involve very different skills.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History

“But like the Mayan civilization, the Toltec civilization declined; it was replaced by the Aztec.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History

“Francisco de Robles decided to publish the latest work of Miguel de Cervantes, a fifty-eight-year-old struggling writer. His stories had been mostly ignored, though his poetry had garnered a few awards and a little attention. He had written a very long work—but it was only Part One. Part Two was coming later, the author said. It was called El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de La Mancha, which today we recognize as the world’s first novel. In 1605, however, it wasn’t clear what to call it.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History

“In addition, their sophisticated accounting techniques, including “double-entry accounting,” with columns of assets and debits, came from the Arabs, though it was known throughout Europe as “Italian accounting.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History

“Muslims had lived in Spain for eight hundred years.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History

“After Shahriyar spends his time deflowering and beheading numerous women, the vizier’s daughter, Scheherazade, understandably against her father’s will, volunteers to be his next lover.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History

“This Chinese influence dominated Japan throughout the entire Heian period (794 to 1185), which took its name from the capital city of Heian-Kyo, today known as Kyoto.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History

“Confucius, who lived from 551 to 479 BCE, believed that education should not be the exclusive privilege of the upper class and established China’s first school for commoners.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History

“LEGEND HAS IT that Cangjie invented Chinese writing around 2700 BCE, but the earliest Chinese writing ever found, near the Yellow River, dates from about 1300 BCE. This is two thousand years later than the first writing found in Mesopotamia and a thousand years later than the earliest writing found in Egypt. Writing was one of the few things the Chinese did not do first—though they do have the world’s oldest living written language.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History

“The Roman alphabet was therefore also similar to Greek, but the Romans added curves to the angular letters, replacing the triangular delta with the rounded D, for example. The Roman alphabet eventually came to dominate the Western world, but linguists regard Greek, a language in which everything is pronounced exactly as written, to be the last great innovation in the history of Western writing, the grandparent of all modern European languages.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History

“Most any language could be transcribed into Hebrew—the first alphabet with that degree of versatility. Jews wrote local languages in Hebrew wherever they went. In Spain, they wrote Spanish with Hebrew letters and it was called Ladino. In North Africa, they wrote Arab with Hebrew and it was called Judeo-Arab. And German written with Hebrew letters in eastern Europe was called Yiddish, while Persian written in Hebrew was Judeo-Persian.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History

“Sumerian tablets pre-date the book of Genesis by some two thousand years and tell a similar story of creation, that of an Adam-esque founder who ate forbidden food and was punished, a woman made from a rib, a great flood, and two brothers similar to Cain and Abel.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History

“The history of technology also shows that Luddites always lose.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History

“The urge to draw is unique to humans,”
― Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History

“In the American South, as recently as the 1930s, flying squirrels were so common that there were recipes for them—they were a favorite local dish. But today, flying squirrels are a scarcity because they live only in old-growth forests.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History

“so far, no one has found an electronic alternative to toilet paper.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History