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White Magic: The Age of Paper, by Lothar Müller
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Paper is older than the printing press, and even in its unprinted state it was the great network medium behind the emergence of modern civilization. In the shape of bills, banknotes and accounting books it was indispensible to the economy. As forms and files it was essential to bureaucracy. As letters it became the setting for the invention of the modern soul, and as newsprint it became a stage for politics.
In this brilliant new book Lothar Müller describes how paper made its way from China through the Arab world to Europe, where it permeated everyday life in a variety of formats from the thirteenth century onwards, and how the paper technology revolution of the nineteenth century paved the way for the creation of the modern daily press. His key witnesses are the works of Rabelais and Grimmelshausen, Balzac and Herman Melville, James Joyce and Paul Valéry.
Müller writes not only about books, however: he also writes about pamphlets, playing cards, papercutting and legal pads. We think we understand the ?Gutenberg era?, but we can understand it better when we explore the world that underpinned it: the paper age.
Today, with the proliferation of digital devices, paper may seem to be a residue of the past, but Müller shows that the humble technology of paper is in many ways the most fundamental medium of the modern world.
- Sales Rank: #1015064 in Books
- Published on: 2015-01-20
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.30" h x 1.20" w x 6.30" l, 1.64 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 352 pages
Review
"Balanced and intelligent... Even those who are happy with e-books will be grateful to Muller's publishers for printing White Magic on good, thick, creamy paper and including, at the end, a dozen blank pages, all of which I have covered with untidy, handwritten notes, to make this mechanical mass-produced artifact intimately my own."
New York Review of Books
"A richly sprawling history"
Times Literary Supplement
"A panoramic literary-historical work reminiscent of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis"
The Washington Post
"What a great read! It is a book to warm up the brain on a day of mental fog."
Inside Higher Education
“Most of this erudite, engaging work is concerned with the rise of paper and its dominance as civilisation's archive and its role as a "metaphorical resource": the origin of phrases such as "a blank page". As well as being a historical account of the way paper came to permeate every aspect of life, Muller mines European literature for the role paper has played in the stories we tell ourselves.”
Sydney Morning Herald
“Lothar Müller… tells an alternative history of paper. He argues, convincingly, that paper has been, and continues to be, integral to our civilisation and the modern world. Through a carefully structured sequence of illuminating vignettes, he brings together fascinating facts from across the globe and the centuries to reveal the long-running and fundamental impact of paper on human life, work and culture.”
Times Higher Education
"Müller’s work leaves the reader admiring something that feels magical."
Publishers Weekly
"...the tale that Lothar Müller spins in White Magic: The Age of Paper is one that brings paper—as both physical material and a playing field on which the human imagination can run wild—to vivid life. Incorporating a wealth of historical detail, technical information, and critical analysis, Müller makes his account lively and compelling, giving paper a personality and substance that is on par with any words that may appear on it. In his book, paper is not just the silent partner of the printing press. Instead, it is an extremely versatile substance—one whose uses and forms shape human thought and behavior in many ways."
The Nomadic Press
“As paper increasingly fades into history, the story of its role and evolution is at risk of being lost, erasing the roadmap that brought us to the digital era. Lothar Müller's White Magic: The Age of Paper goes a long way to averting that fate, going back in time to record and describe in intricate detail how paper came to be, and what it came to be.”
South China Morning Post
"Consistently readable and highly entertaining, this witty and learned book deftly decouples paper's history from the story of printing to tell new and surprising tales about a medium that continues to pervade our daily life. You'll never look at a blank page in quite the same way again."
Catherine Robson, New York University
"This is an absorbing history of paper, fascinating in its detail and magisterial in its scope. Muller writes with the authority of a scholar and the imagination of a poet, filling his book with curious but essential facts and astute perceptions. It is a delight to read."
Jeremy Adler, King’s College London
"Müller’s history of paper is original, engaging and breathtakingly erudite. It explores paper in its materiality, but also as a source of inspiration which has shaped the history of knowledge and creativity. In tracing paper’s vital role in the development of human civilisation, the author also argues for its continued importance in the digital age."
Carolin Duttlinger, Wadham College, Oxford
"Lothar Müller set out dazzling new insights into the creation of our world, building on Harold Innis’ work on the long and complex emergence of paper. Unique in his White Magic is his subtle blending of cultural and media history with sociological understanding and literary reflexion."
Philippe Despoix, Center of Intermedial Research in Arts, Literatures and Technologies, Université de Montréal
About the Author
Lothar Müller is editor of the features section of the Süddeutsche Zeitung. He taught general and comparative literature at Berlin Free University and, since 2010, he has been an Honorary Professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin. In 2013 he was awarded the Berlin Prize for Literary Criticism.
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Delightful History
By Thomas F. Dillingham
Lothar Muller’s White Magic: The Age of Paper joins a growing array of histories that focus on a manmade product or practice, custom or institution, tracing the discovery or invention of the subject and its changing roles through human history. Such histories are often fascinating in themselves as they illuminate unsuspected or obscure effects of the development of a familiar or commonplace object on the daily lives or social or political events and changes, exploring positive or negative impacts on human culture and civilization resulting from the subject of the book. Some such studies (Marshall McLuhan’s groundbreaking analyses of the impact of modern media, for example) become foundational, even as they are superseded by further scholarly and popular studies that develop or challenge their conclusions
.
Muller’s focus is on paper, as the subtitle suggests, and he engages the reader’s fascination as he presents the history of the invention—really inventions plural, since different peoples in different parts of the world developed and used paper in different ways early in its history—and the impact of the simple product we normally take for granted, whether we are writing a shopping list or a love letter, printing an essay from our word processor or recycling the week’s newspapers and food wrappers.
Muller’s prose style is sprightly and engaging, for the most part, but he inspires confidence in his scholarship and accuracy while providing information and illuminating historical connections. He examines the language of paper (we use paper when we are required to carry “papers,” though in recent times such documentation of identity has evolved toward forms that no longer appear with paper as the medium), the history of the manufacturing process and the changing qualities of paper made for various uses, the impact on communities and countries (and the environment) of the presence of paper factories and distributors, and he displays a wide and deep literary knowledge, tracing the appearances and functions of paper through a considerable (and appealing) variety of allusions from Medieval to modern and contemporary literary works.
Quite a few historians of “material culture” and “costume,” agricultural, manufacturing, and artistic developments, have provided insights into the impacts of human invention, especially, on human life. For this book, a helpful and very interesting companion volume might be Simon Garfield’s Just My Type: A History of Fonts, a somewhat lighter but informative and enjoyable study of the historical and economic contexts of the development of different typefaces, beginning with Gutenberg. This parallels parts of Muller’s study and pairing them offers insights into the role of publishing, especially, in history.
I would recommend this volume enthusiastically to anyone interested in the ways in which the development of paper contributed to and enhanced the history of modern civilization
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
A highly original, thoroughly researched, closely argued and pleasant read!
By A. W. Moats
At least one (myopic) reviewer dealt with this solely on the basis of its criticisms of McLuhan. Too bad!
This book is highly original and eye-opening, dispelling many myths that are routinely taught about the emergence and development of the printed word. An essential resource for anyone interested in the histories of technology or communication.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Eurocentric string of vignettes, mostly of literary texts
By Stephen O. Murray
There are interesting discussions of a number of writers (all in the western tradition, though paper was invented in China) in “White Magic” but I was disappointed by the book as a history. It has not much about markets, not much about uses other than reproducing texts (hand copying and printing). There is a bit about playing cards, but nothing about business cards. There is a section on collecting “autographs,” but mostly in the sense of hand-written manuscripts with nothing at all about signed first editions.
I balk at the very title: paper is not necessarily white (wrapping paper is mentioned but not enough to rate an entry in the index); no one seems to have regarded it as magical, and the delineation of boundaries for “THE age of paper” are not made (Müller argues that it is not over). Müller insists that the history of paper is not confined to printing (any “Gutenberg Galaxy” of “typographic man” between any “manuscript culture” and the “electronic age” for storage and circulation of information, primarily texts).
I also balk at the length of many of the paragraphs and repeatedly wondered why Müller was writing about this or that particular author (Rabelais and Cervantes, Melville and Henry James, Balzac and Dickens yes, and he’s German, so Goethe must be considered; but William Gaddis, George Lichtenberg, Paul Valéry, et al., no). Müller does not mention the just deceased Benedict Anderson’s thesis about the importance of vernacular literature in imagining communities/nations, and barely considers the world beyond Anglo North America and western Europe after paper ceased to depend on transportation along the Silk Road.
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