The most recommended books about paper

I love all books by Eric Carle. I read The Very Hungry Caterpillar to my children when they were young, as well as The Very Quiet Cricket, which is a firm favourite. This book is very funny and plays with paper, design, and type. It is brightly coloured and his inimitable illustrative style is fantastic. Using different paper sizes, flaps, die-cuts, etc. has always interested me and makes story time fun for kids too.

With over 150 Step-by-step Techniques and Projects and Over 1000 Photographs, this great book gives you card ideas for every occasion. It also shows you how to make easy but professional-looking envelopes, invitations, tags, and papers in a host of different styles. Takes less time to make a card than going out and buying one!

How do we decide what is kept? Every librarian will spend some part of their lives ‘weeding’ items from their collections: a necessary and important task. In this book, Nicholson Baker chronicles, with increasing agitation, what happens when de-accessioning gets out of control, and little foresight is given to weeding. Written from the perspective of a journalist uncovering a major hushed-up conspiracy, Double Fold demonstrates how (mostly American) libraries destroyed much of their historic newspaper stock during the twentieth century, throwing them out in favor of a new and fancy (but now largely obsolete) technology, the microfilm. The book made major waves, and is one of the finest clarion calls for the careful preservation of rare items, such as newspapers, which are often poorly catalogued and stored, but are priceless historical and cultural artefacts.

In this fun follow-up to Dog Loves Books, Dog receives a special package in the mail - a blank book! His Aunt Dora tells him it’s for drawing. Dog begins to fill the pages with characters and draws himself right into the adventure across the pages. I love how the illustrations are approachable and will get kids excited to break out pen and paper and draw their own adventures. It makes me feel like breaking out my sketchbook right now!

This book took me on a slow-burn journey and I loved it. Watching the main characters and how they grew throughout the book really moved me. It also features some soccer (which I love) and a heroine who is strong and amazing and focused and a hero who is an anti-hero at first, but he will have you falling in love with him in no time. Coach Kulti truly is the guy you don’t want to like, but you can’t help but fall for once he bares himself to the reader (and the heroine). This book is definitely a must-read. Mariana Zapata writes the best slow-burn romances. 

This Panda is very certain about what he likes and doesn’t like.

You could say he’s very black and white about his opinions. And that’s why the mostly black-and-white paper cut illustrations work even more! Panda’s house is stark as well.

Then one day he begrudgingly accepts a red flower from an elephant which throws him off. But in the end he makes it work. I love the graphic look of the art. 

Müller takes up the story of the Kingdom of Paper by illustrating that the Kingdom was still firmly in place by 1932 when paper was omnipresent and indispensable in and for modern civilization. 

He focuses on paper as more than just a writing surface, especially on its physical, material form, as a product of civilization, something which does not occur naturally in the world but instead requires a technology to produce. This leads him into the great boom in Western paper mills and the realization that we are after all still living in what Marshall McLuhan called the “Gutenberg era” which was made possible by paper. 

Müller further notes how in 1997, faced with what seemed like the extinction of the Kingdom of Paper in the face of the Internet, the world found out that paper continues to have a massive presence in modern civilization even after the explosion of… show more.

Bloom’s book, available in hardcover at a reasonable price, but not on Kindle, is a work of art. 

His intention is obviously to cover the period between 105 AD when pulp paper was first made and the 1000s AD when the Islamic papermakers saw their improved paper taken over by medieval Italian mills where it was improved further into the type of paper that could be used by Gutenberg in the 1450s. 

This period of over a thousand years saw profound changes, during which the papyrus paper and parchment that still ruled the Kingdom of Paper was gradually replaced. Bloom also explores the impact of paper on the development of writing, books, mathematics, music, art, architecture, and even cooking.

And he discusses why Europe was so quick to adopt paper from the Islamic lands and why the Islamic lands were so slow to accept printing in return. Altogether a remarkable… show more.

Monro draws our attention to China and Islam and provides evidence of the spread of the Kingdom of Paper later in the 10th Century to China where millions were using Chinese pulp paper for money, scrolls, and other products. 

He presents a detailed history of writing in China and the use of early media, esp. silk, and bamboo strips. Paper, whatever it was made of and wherever it appeared, was a writing surface cheap, portable, and printable enough that books and pamphlets began to be mass-produced and to travel more widely through the world from the time of Cheops’ early papyrus paper. 

Monro discusses how in the pre-digital age, paper aided the rise of both universal education and universal suffrage and refers to the ‘Republic of Letters’ which transcended national divisions. In modern times the multiple uses of paper, especially as wrappings, indicate that the Kingdom of Paper has… show more.

Basbanes’ book examines the many uses for paper. 

He takes us along on a visit to papermaking family mills in villages in China and Japan where handmade paper is still produced in quantity, using two-thousand-year-old traditional methods and local plant materials. This is followed by a summary of the development of pulp paper in Asia, Islam, Italy, and Europe including the evolution of paper machines. 

Much of the book is devoted to an extensive coverage of every possible use of paper, including disposable paper, paper cartridges for rifles, artillery wadding, cigarettes, passports, coded messages, hard copy secret documents, government archives, recycled paper, paper money, postage stamps, diaries, letters, artistic designs, music scores, junk mail, construction plans, origami and paper models.

All proof that as someone said, “The paperless society is about as plausible today as the paperless bathroom.”