A Delightful Incurable Disease
Meet a papermaker and you meet a most peculiar person: he or she is bright of eye, clean of hand, and beats neither spouse nor children. Papermakers just beat rags and grow things.
Papermakers are a happy lot, a special group in love with what it does, sharing an incurable, contagious, low-budget, high-fevered, mysterious disease with all friends and acquaintances: papermaking.
What are the symptoms of this epidemic disease? Apocryphal writings have long suggested that a positive correlation existed between the quantity of alcohol an individual consumes and the quality of the paper said individual produces. But even if one is addicted solely to carbonated soft drinks, coffee, or tea, the primary characteristic of the disease is an unquenchable desire to make one sheet of paper, or a work of paper, after another ad infinitum; other evidence includes a sensual pleasure in wearing cotton and linen costumes which, at a moment’s notice, are ripped off one’s back and transmuted to handmade paper. A collector who sorts and labels rags for future use may be suspect; others who admit, albeit reluctantly, that they grow a few acres of flax on the back forty, who dye the flax and put it through a flax break, scutching knife, and board, who whip and comb it through a flax heckle before beating it and turning it into paper are, obviously, hooked for life. People who use a colorful jargon composed of simple, earthy words may be papermakers aborning, especially if the words have meanings other than those shown in standard dictionaries.
Individually, papermakers are male and female artists who can be wedded to either personalized blue jeans or generalized banker’s or engineer’s gray flannel; who either wear no socks or sport the latest fad in leg coverings; who are bemoccasined, booted, or wear made-to-order shoes made in London; who may seem scruffy looking as befits a certain age group or pass as examples of walking dress mannequins; who are technically oriented people dependent on precise equations or free spirits whose attitude to paper formulas and papermaking (and all else) in general is summed up in hunch or intuition -a pinch of this, a smidgin of that. But, it works.
By and large, they are an interesting group, a cross section of all humanity.
