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White Magic: The Age of Paper Reprint Edition

by Lothar Müller (Author)

4.0 34 ratings

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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.

Editorial Reviews

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.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Polity Press; Reprint edition (March 28, 2016)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 328 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 074567254X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0745672540
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.08 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.9 x 1 x 8.9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #4,127,775 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,213 in Media Studies (Books)
- #2,248 in History of Engineering & Technology
- #5,035 in History of Technology

Customer Reviews:
4.0 34 ratings

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Lothar Müller
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Jessica Spengler
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Jessica Spengler is a German-English translator specializing in the humanities and social sciences, with a particular focus on 20th-century German history. In addition to translating non-fiction books for individual authors and publishers, she regularly works with various foundations, educational institutions, and concentration camp memorials in Germany.
She was born in America, lived and studied in Germany for 14 years, and currently resides in the UK. She has a bachelor’s degree in German Studies from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and a master’s degree in Applied Linguistics from the University of Sussex in England.
Jessica is a member of the American Translators Association (ATA) and the Translators Association (TA) of the Society of Authors in the UK. She is also a founding member of the Brighton Language Collective, an independent group of language professionals working in Brighton, England.
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A. J Terry

Scholarly but very readable history of paper

Reviewed in the United States on June 8, 2016

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White Magic is a history of the evolution of paper from its roots in China, around 105 AD, to the present. It discusses the details of paper production in various eras, the ease and speed of communication that paper has enabled, and the ways in which such communication has transformed society. As you might expect, the main focus is on publishing, but some other uses of paper are discussed, such as playing cards. White Magic is scholarly, not fluffy like some popular histories on comparatively narrow subjects, but it is engaging and rewarding to read. Its tendency to digress is compensated for by the many interesting facts revealed in the digressions. The bibliography is long, but most sources won’t be accessible to many English-speaking readers because this book was translated from German. Highly recommended for book lovers and anyone who works in publishing.

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A. W. Moats

A highly original, thoroughly researched, closely argued and pleasant read!

Reviewed in the United States on January 26, 2016

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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.

2 people found this helpful

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mirasreviews

History of the Age of Paper in Europe and How It Was Reflected in Literature.

Reviewed in the United States on July 18, 2016

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Lothar Muller’s familiarity with both academia, as a literary scholar and professor, and the press, as an editor and journalist, form an interesting symbiosis in “White Magic: The Age of Paper”, a literary-historical work of the Age of Paper in Europe and, most particularly, how that Age saw, and sees, itself. This is a history of paper in the West, as it explains “how paper became a basic element of Western civilization and how it came to occupy such a key position.” But Muller focuses on “the question of what modern European Literature knows about he material from which it is made” in particular. “White Paper” is both a book about paper and a book about books. There are many ways to approach the subject of paper; Muller includes information about its manufacture and industrialization, its use in playing cards, cigarette papers, boxes, bags, and artworks, printed and unprinted, but he always returns to the literature, to see what paper was saying about itself.

Lothar starts at the beginning, with the development of paper in China and the transfer of papermaking technologies to Arabs, who adapted them in Medieval paper mills. Here he begins his examination of paper in literature with “The Thousand and One Nights” as well as a number of Jewish histories. The first European paper mill opened in Fabriano, Italy circa 1235. Europeans incorporated technologies from mills and metalworking for larger-scale production. Paper was a part of the lives of the general population in Europe long before the printing press, and interaction with it didn’t necessarily require literacy. Europe saw 200 years of paper innovation before the Gutenberg era. Paper was increasingly vital to the financial world…and to communication: “As paper became the dominant medium of written communication, paper and the postal system formed an alliance which was just as epochal as that between paper and the printing press.”

“White Magic” is organized into three parts. The first brings us up to the early 17th century. The second is dedicated to a “transitional period”, which saw both printed/bound and unprinted/bound literature circulating, a “parallel use of handwriting and print.” Muller makes the interesting observation that the printed/unprinted dichotomy in some ways replaced the historical text/speech dichotomy, with the unprinted word now taking on an esoteric implication, where it had previously been exoteric. In any case, authorship became contingent on being printed, while handwritten “papers” developed a caché as revelatory documents. This leads Muller to the discussion of paper in 17th century novels and a chapter about epistolary novels of that period, in which the novel mimics letter paper and the author puts himself forward as an editor of someone’s “papers”. From there it is on to the explosion of paper in the nineteenth century due to the invention of paper machines.

Muller’s final part discusses the industrialization of papermaking and ubiquity of paper in the 19th and 20th centuries. Paper was a “fundamental motif” in the 19th century that “bound together every social sphere.” It was everywhere: newspapers, tabloids, periodicals, penny dreadfuls, placards, advertisements, legal papers, cigarette paper, cardboard boxes, luxury paper, silhouettes and cut paper, paper models, etc. While papermaking had been constrained by political and economic factors for centuries, it was no longer. Compulsory schooling and growing state bureaucracies did their share to increase demand for paper. The 20th century saw further expansion and standardization. Among literature that Muller turns to for a perspective on paper from the time are works of Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Herman Melville. Muller’s Epilogue compares analog books and periodicals to digital and concludes that “the Paper Age is not yet finished.”

“White Magic” can be dense going. The translator, Jessica Spengler, has retained the long German paragraphs. This doesn’t make wading through the literary references any easier. This is not an easy book to read in English, though I found the first part more plodding –and more given to tangents- than parts two and three. The straight history and discussion of unprinted and printed paper were more interesting to me than the literary perspective, but that’s a matter of taste. There was more discussion of printed versus unprinted paper than I expected, but that’s good, as they achieved different significance in the Gutenberg era, which I hadn’t given much thought before. If you’re interested in the history of unprinted paper, I highly recommend “Paper Before Print” by art historian Jonathan M. Bloom. It is a history of paper in the Islamic world, which was slow to adopt printing technologies due to difficulties rendering the many permutations of the Arabic alphabet.

Reviewed in the United States on October 10, 2015

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A brilliant and original book, beautifully written and filled with fascinating and unexpected insights.

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Thomas F. Dillingham

Delightful History

Reviewed in the United States on January 21, 2016

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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

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Amazon Customer

Paper as the Basis of Western Values

Reviewed in Canada on October 29, 2016

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This is a splendid history of paper in occidental culture that at every point shows how mistaken the attack of McLuhan on print culture really was, and how it has been paper that has allowed us all along to maintain a crucial balance between time-biased and space-biased monopolies of knowledge associated with other forms of media. In the rise of digital media, that balance is now shifting away from concerns of time and duration to concerns with the reduction of spatial boundaries and the recolonization of the globe. "White Magic" offers a timely reminder of the material foundations of Western civilization and the potential threat of space-biased media to our liberal values.

bmi

Very interesting read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 9, 2015

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Paper is one of those things that are so necessary to our life but we don't think about. Even today was reading about how books are making a come-back against electronic readers and then how Bitcoins have once again been hacked.

This book helps you think about how important paper has been in forming our world.

Absolutely buy what people say about it being dense and at times a little abstruse but there is a great index and as a general reader it is something I will read alongside something else.

So it lost half a star for some of the rather academic language and then another half star for not having more pictures, yet alone coloured ones.

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Charlotte

An erudite history, but not an outstanding conveyor of the 'magic' of paper

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 6, 2015

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This book disappointed me.

It fulfills its brief to provide a comprehensive history of paper, and a 'breathtakingly erudite' one indeed - but bringing to life the 'magic' of paper as its title implies? For me, no it did not do that.

The book uses difficult vocabulary - sometimes I really struggled to understand it (I have a degree in English, and work as a writer)! So I'd say this was a book intended for academics, libraries and students, and not the layperson like me who is interested in the aesthetics of paper and printing.

This book would have benefited from more generous use of plates and illustrations. There are some black and white pictures, but I would have liked much greater use of visual information, especially in colour.

So in conclusion, a muted 'thumbs up', for a limited audience.

EllyBlue

Fascinating, thought-provoking and well worth reading.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 16, 2015

Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )

This is a fascinating insight into how the ubiquity of paper has affected the modern world. It isn't just about paper that has words printed on it, or about books and newspapers, but also more broadly, for example, how the presence of paper has shaped the way the system of money developed, how it combined effectively with other technologies (and not just the printing press) and how paper has enabled societies to both store and spread their ideas to people separated by boundaries of space and time. The end of the book contains a consideration of the role that paper will play in an increasingly digital age. The author makes the point that paper has often been combined with other technologies in the past, and makes the claim that paper will still have a role to play in the 21st century. This book was originally written in German in an academic style and a good translator has been used to make it accessible in English. It's detailed and meticulously referenced. It isn't a "light" read or a "popular history" and will require sustained concentration. However, it is a fascinating and absorbing read about both cultural and technological developments that have shaped our world.

Mr. K. P. Rogers

More academic than entertaining or generally informative

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 17, 2014

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I was at first intrigued by the title and subject of this book -- paper -- and then as I read it I began to marvel at the processes and time involved in making this most universal and ubiquitous form of communication.

The book is essentially a history of paper, and is divided into three parts:
1. the spread of paper from Arabia to Europe, and techniques used in paper manufacture;
2. typography, and uses of paper in novels and its effect on communication pre-twentieth century;
3. newspapers, twentieth-century print, letters.
An epilogue looks at the future role of paper in the 'digital era'.

The book is black-and-white printed, with many in-text pictures and illustrations.

Lothar Müller's book was published in German in 2012, and is here translated by Jessica Spengler, published for the first time in English by 'polity'.

This book isn't really aimed at the general audience who might be interested in history. It is quite academic in its tone, aimed more at the history or anthropology student. I found it quite tough reading in places, although a lot of it is very interesting. The opening line sets the tone: "Paper is a protean substance". Simpler language could be used. [Protean means that it can frequently change easily.]

For the academic, this is a great source. The book is littered with references that the academic can follow-up -- useful indeed.

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