Was early modern writing paper expensive? (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Was early modern writing paper expensive? (2018)

folger.edu

69 pointsBluestein92 comments

"Prices and the Growth of the European Knowledge Economy, 1200-2007" by Rodney Edvinsson and Johan Söderberg Department of Economic History Stockholm University: https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:384596/FULLTEXT0...

See page 10, Figure 5: Price of paper/CPI in England, 1356-1869, and the Netherlands, 1450-1800.

This shows that the price of paper declined exponentially from 1350 to 1650. The decrease in the cost of paper made printing economical. Printing on vellum was not. They point out that each Gutenberg Bible printed on vellum required the skins of 300 sheep.

>They point out that each Gutenberg Bible printed on vellum required the skins of 300 sheep.

Even that doesn't say much about its value. I have no idea the scale of the sheep industry in these times. Presumably people were growing up sheep to make use of the entire sheep, not merely to create bibles. It might be better to consider what that sheep leather might have been used for otherwise if it didn't have a buyer in the form of a printing press.

Even accounting for that, it was definitely much higher than a few cents per sheet.

The causality can easily run in the other direction, with the desire to print things pushing people into using cheap, shoddy paper instead of quality vellum.

The cost of the hides and the labor of turning them into vellum dominated the labor of inscribing a page. Printing would not decrease the cost of finished pages, especially for small numbers of copies.

The decrease in the cost of paper resulted from the increased availability of linen rags, use of wind power in production of rag pulp, and the larger volumes of rag paper used for commercial records and correspondence before the invention of printing.

Your logic is that the drive to produce more books wouldn't lead to using cheaper paper... because paper was, at the beginning of the process, extremely expensive?

I have many books, and none of them are on sheepskin. They are not printed on cheap, shoddy paper.

Why do you say so? Would printing them on vellum make them cheaper, or shoddier?

I have a note , written by my grandmother in , aroun 1930, that indicates paper was expensive for her. She was a farmers wife

During WW2, the Germans started a large operation to print counterfeit 5 pound notes. The intent was to "bomb" them over England to bankrupt the currency.

But the end of the war overtook the operation, and the notes were dumped in the nearby river.

The locals fished the notes out and used them for TP. (The manufacture of TP was a casualty of priority war production.)

"Money of Their Own" by Murray Bloom https://www.amazon.com/Money-Their-Own-Ingenious-Counterfeit...

The BBC made a comedic miniseries about this, I forgot the name. All I remember is one of officers saying "if you don't do this, you'll be shot and then you'll be sorry!"

The BBC miniseries was called "Private Schultz": https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081919/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

Thank you. I checked the library, ebay, and amazon for it - no luck!

That officer will have been Major Neuheim, a blustering and venial SS bureaucrat played with panache by Ian Richardson (not unlike his role as Mr Warrenn in "Brazil"). I'm also puzzled how little-known the series has become, since I remember it fondly.

What is “TP”?

Toilet paper.

Then again ... might it have been depression-era conditions affecting her?

PS. This tangentially raises an interesting question: Did the American Depression generally have worldwide economic consequences?

It was a global economic depression, some nations harder hit than others, and only really recovered by nation states shifting to a centrally planned total war economy to kick start unprecedented investment in manufacturing and industry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression#Socio-economi...

Fun fact – italic typefaces was invented to save paper since slanted letters allow tighter kerning.

Can you dig out a reference for that? WP describes it as evolving from a representation of handwriting, initially used for informal or intimate writing, later being employed for emphasis.

Something I've been unable to figure out: what is the trick you have to invent to make wood pulp paper? Is it chemical, or do you just need to keep smashing at wood chips in water?

You need to break down the lignin without damaging the cellulose. Boiling and mashing doesnt do this very well, you still get bundles of fibres sticking together, you really need them all to separate. The bonds holding lignins together are slightly different between grasses and wood. For grasses sodium carbonate or hydroxide dissolves the lignin pretty well (i havnt tried but you could probably get away with wood ash and some salt for this, to provide sodium and high ph), and allows you to make some pretty nice paper. This as far as i know includes things like papyrus, sugarcane etc. Wood is different, you need sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfate to dissolve the lignin. This contributes to the smell of the paper making process where wood is used. I dont think the ancients knew about the use of sulfates, so their papers were mostly made of grasses or leather (vellum).

Wood pulp is extremely tough. Why use water power to pulp wood for a very long time when you can use it to pulp rags for a much shorter time to get the same amount of product?

Water power is limited. Consequently, you have to make choices as to what you are going to use it for. At that point economics kick in.

Until your demand for paper significantly exceeds supply, you won't start looking for a better process. And then it took until the steam engine until such a process became economical.

> At that point economics kick in.

(And chemicals ...)

You have to prove that wood pulp works well enough before anybody will invest in the chemistry research. Proving that wood pulp works effectively for paper requires the steam engine.

Technological advance almost always consists of many incremental steps that have to come together simultaneously.

Generally, the limitation was economic--if there was enough money at stake humans are clever enough that they will find a way.

My understanding is that both chemical and mechanical are methods.-

Was early modern writing paper expensive? (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20559968 - July 2019 (4 comments)

James Burke said it best

https://youtube.com/watch?v=-XoTGFC-0NA&pp=ygUrQ29ubmVjdGlvb...

Burke for President.-

Things are not inherently expensive. They are expensive relative to the other demands on one's finances.

For the average person paper would indeed have been expensive but for those who had disposable income and a reason to use paper it would have felt less so.

But it was certainly more expensive than it is now that 500 sheets of A4 at Tesco cost less than 5 GBP and that is one part in 6 400 of UK median annual household income.

https://www.folger.edu/blogs/collation/writing-paper-expensi... says that the going rate for a quire of ordinary paper was about 4d.

Even in 1800 annual income for most people was under 20 pounds. So 500 sheets would cost one part in 60 of annual income (20 pounds * 240 pennies per pound/(4d per quire * 20 quires in 500)). That's about a hundred times more expensive in purchasing power terms. Presumably the further back you go the higher the price and the lower the income.

But the poor didn't write so the comparison is far from exact. For the wealthy it would still have been more expensive than now but not importantly so.

There is a tendency to talk about "the poor" as an extreme case, and "the wealthy" as an extreme case. But in doing so you make the entire problem irrelevant. As you say, the extreme poor at that time does not write, and the extreme wealthy at that time does not care.

The question is only relevant for a more "normal" case that both writes and is price-sensitive. Say, a student, a public writer, an accountant, a letter or litterary writer.

> question is only relevant for a more "normal" case that both writes and is price-sensitive

Economics happens at the margin.

I'd counter that certain things are expensive and as technologies change, it opens up the technology to a broader audience, which poor people can write now due to changing affordability in writing due to technological changes. With paper/printing that drives literacy where the cheaper the technologies available are, the greater the population literacy. It for instance would be difficult to have a widely literate population if such population was stuck with using animal skins for paper with books being manually handwritten by educated and trained craftsmen. Products that require significant manual labor and/or space inherently bear a cost regardless of the type of economy involved, like the pyramids of Egypt (or Stonehenge, etc) are inherently expensive even though their construction pre-dates the use of currency.

> it opens up the technology to a broader audience,

What's that Gibson quote about the future being here, just not yet widely distributed?

> with books being manually handwritten by educated and trained craftsmen.

On this good point: Wonder what (many, certainly) crafts are involved in the build-up and "appearance" of the printing press? (for example).-

All the (dozen) skills necessary to get to movable type, alone, for example.-

PS. On a tangent: That'd be an interesting "worldview" layer for an AI - a really good sense of how technological progress has come about, in order to produce further innovations - doing multitudes-of-experts research in parallel to get to a desired outcome. That would be grand ...

There's an old BBC TV series called Connections that explores how technological progress happened. I think you can find most/all episodes on YouTube now.

Also from Burke, The Day the Universe Changed. He also has a recent new Connections miniseries.

- https://archive.org/details/ConnectionsByJamesBurke

Spreading the gospel of Burke :)

As I always feel I must when "Connections" pops up, truly, an outstanding masterpiece - the original and subsequent seasons.-

PS. This comment, is, in fact, totally Burke:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41087042

... he reasons as much, in the show, from spinning wheel to printing press (and before and beyond, of course).-

PSS. Featuring, as y'all certain know, the (arguably) "best timed" shot in the history of broadcast TV.-

Nice coincidence! Last week-end I remembered watching Connections in the 1990s on TV, blowing my 7th grade mind back then, and then watched it partly out of nostalgia. I ended up binging it, and was surprised that it felt even better now. Especially the philosophical aspects felt even more important now.

At the end I was a bit upset that there isn't anything like this being made, where the production treats the audience as intelligent and capable of grasping complex topics.

I make it an actual point of rewatching the entire thing yearly.-

When at some point nothing else does, that show rekindles a sense of wonder and amazement at life and its complexity that is sine qua non for me.-

PS. I feel it also serves to (somehow) "frame" each of our lives - my own - as being dot-positioned as a small- yet significant - speck in a big, ongoing, neverending, marvelous, unavoidable and unstoppable march through time.-

Further - and Burke makes an special point of this in one of the "framing" episodes - the individual people (that is, us) responsible for that onward march were as confused, concerned, discouraged or baffled about their future as we might be today about ours - or, oft - just trying to get by, or make a buck.-

Poignantly, this might sound obvious, they, further did not know what the future held, what the consequences would be of their actions - but somehow, in lockstep - all the necessary pieces were being put together for some grand, tectonic invention or method to later appear, making their individual contributions indispensable.-

I find that encouraging.-

Right. It's difficult to compare because the quantities involved are relevant.

If paper were 100x more expensive today, e.g. it would cost £1 per A4 sheet rather than £0.01, but it was the only way to take notes, then I would still buy it and just moderate my use.

It's not like you need thousands and thousands of sheets of paper.

My parents' habits were formed from the Depression, and they always conserved paper. I'd receive letters from them written on the back sides of junk mail flyers, and the back sides of mimeographed papers from work. The writing went right to the edge of the paper.

Those habits rubbed off on me, and I still have a box of scrap paper I use.

I do that too! I tear napkins in half, sometimes quarters, then I keep the small bits and use them later. Or use the napkin from the table to mop up spills if it didn't get used much. That sort of thing.

Back when I could still read my own handwriting, and back when I printed things with regularity, I used to use failed prints as scrap paper for my math homework. I figured that the paper was wasted, so getting any more use of out if was less wasted money.

Yes! Waste not want not.

> I would still buy it and just moderate my use.

I think I'd still use it exactly the same amount (I fill 1-10 pages a day) but I'd be more careful about letting unused pages go to waste.

I would think thriftyness would actually end up influencing your handwriting.-

  PS. That'd make for an interesting study ...

The price of a satellite phone in 1650 was greater than all the money in the world combined, so that has to be considered expensive in absolute terms, right?

A satellite phone in the 1600s would useless other than the novelty of owning one to just look at it and play with it. The battery is dead shortly after it arrives, there's no one else to talk to, and there's no infrastructure to do anything with it. The level of technology is beyond what any 1600s scientists have even dreamed about. Maybe there are a few things inside that could improve science. A lithium battery is not that complex so perhaps scientists of the time would have been able to see it for what it is and move up the invention of batteries by about 200 years. Plastics in the phone would be interesting but without petrochemical developments, it would have been totally unknown. Overall, the phone would have a fascinating collection of rare and unknown materials.

It would be like if I gave you a car and told you to build another from scratch with a gift of unlimited money to make it happen. You could use existing knowledge resources to build crude tools to build more sophisticated tools that would eventually produce the parts for a car. But without that existing supply of knowledge, how would you do it? You would need to invent all the tools yourself to produce something as simple as an engine block. You'd be looking at the end result of 200 years of the industrial revolution without any idea of what happened in between.

It reminds me of Hank building out an entire telephone network in 6th Century England:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Connecticut_Yankee_in_King_A...

Not like much would change, but this would be funny: Let's "up" the ante and make it two phones, using point-to-point ad-hoc voice connection to each other, with a battery life of a week.-

That would be quite the "footnote" somewhere ...

PS. I hate to "underestimate" our forebears, but ... at what point would they just throw their hands up in the air and start screaming "witchcraft!" burning the lot, phone samples and all, at the stake?

> Let's "up" the ante and make it two phones, using point-to-point ad-hoc voice connection to each other, with a battery life of a week

To make it truly interesting you'd have to add a geostationary relay satellite and e.g. solar recharging, to make the device useful for up to a lifetime. At this point, we have a military communications device of obvious value. (Presuming you get to a non-idiot.)

British GDP (the highest in the world under a single state) was about $10.7bn in 1700 in 1960 dollars PPP [1] or about $113bn today [2]. At its height, in the 16th century, Britain spent about 10% of its GDP on its military [2]. So the price for a working pair of satellite phones is reasonably capped around $11bn in today's money. Of course, having a pair of satellite phones and no military isn't helpful, so in practice we'd likely see a top price equal to no more than $1 to 2bn today.

At which point one asks what size army one could raise to steal your satellite phones with a fraction of that money.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(P...

[2] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com

[2] https://eh.net/encyclopedia/military-spending-patterns-in-hi...

> add a geostationary relay satellite and e.g. solar recharging

That would indeed be something.-

Had originally limited battery to a week in the thought experiment as I was curious about what would happen after they became mere "inert" objects.-

(Image the Pope being summoned - and a church Council being called for and the device suddenly ceasing to work - with hundreds claiming it once did ...)

The price is undefined because there is no conception of the object and therefore no market.

If the idea of a phone - a computing/telecommunication device that use natural philosophy and not magic - were presented then an initial price can begin to be formed, defined as the amount of money they are willing to spend to develop it.

Raising a (serious) question: Is the price of an impossible (or, period-impossible) object a knowable quantity, economically speaking?

> Is the price of an impossible (or, period-impossible) object a knowable quantity, economically speaking?

Yes. We estimate what someone in that world would pay for it. A satellite phone in a world without satellites, electricity or other satellite phones is at best a novelty. So we'd look to rates paid by kings and collectors for similar antiquities.

I think it is knowable, to some degree, in retrospect. The day before the first iPhone was released was its price unknowable?

The prices of many of the "parts" were already known on that day. Perhaps most notably wireless service. This would have allowed at least a ballpark estimate for what people would be willing to pay.

The iPhone wasn't the first cell phone and wasn't the first smartphone either. One could assume that it would cost at least as much as a brand new Blackberry or Windows Mobile phone since not only was it Apple but it has features that no one else had at the time. Of course it still had to be affordable if Apple wanted it to sell well so people had some idea of what wouldn't be reasonable for what a smartphone should cost.

Point.-

PS. In a bit, like the weather? The further from the present you go, the "harder" it gets to solve for that?

That said, when approaching (or, surpassing) some "imposibility boundary" - for more an more parts to actually exist, ultimately leading to the whole being impossible ...

... that's when it gets interesting.-

I think that's true. If you described an early personal computer and its capabilities (including software) in 1970, sure, a lot of people would be "Why would I want that?" But both business people and individuals could probably give some reasonable approximation of what they'd be willing to pay.

The thing with something like a phone is that it's so dependent on several different network effects that it's hard to put a real value on it in isolation. Of course, for an individual device, there's very much an upper limit. I suspect that a lot of people in 1970 would balk at the price of an iPhone but then they had other telecoms charges that would seem extortionate today.

>I suspect that a lot of people in 1970 would balk at the price of an iPhone

And in 2024.

> "Why would I want that?"

That question was asked and answered at the time. To store recipes on.

Once the PC arrived, though, the real drivers of sales were word processing and spreadsheets.

> answered at the time. To store recipes on.

Was this a thing? (Recipe storage being the "killer app" ...)

Ironically, storing recipes never caught on. It's just what people thought home computers would be useful for.

The popularity of cooking shows, especially cooking competitions/reality show hybrids seems to give some credence to that assumption.

I see.-

You make an interesting distinction between perceived prospective use and actual use ...

I have a copy of an old humorous computer article in a book to the effect of things that people thought they'd want computers for and how they didn't really play out (given the tech at the time).

Yeah, agreed, an iPhone or really most computers is a difficult comparison to make for this sort of thing. I mean, what is an iPhone anyway? It relies on a lot of infrastructure that wouldn’t be available in the 70’s: the modern internet, the apple App Store, usb chargers, a way to write and compile iOS programs and get it to run them, the first and third party programming ecosystem.

It seems like a nitpick but the value proposition of the thing is very dependent on the ability of all those, I’m sure we all have some intuition of which ought to be included, but it might not match.

An iPhone with all those things would probably be extremely valuable I guess. Thousands of times faster than the fastest supercomputer and a bit easier to carry.

The Blackberry was initially mostly of interest to "important people" whose organizations were paying for easier texting and email on the go. I did eventually get a Treo in 2006 on my own mostly because I was doing some travel on crutches and didn't want to carry a laptop. But the iPhone--especially by a few years post-2007 introduction--was really transformational for a lot of people in the mainstream. But, as you say, that was dependent on a lot of things that weren't inherent in the phone hardware.

Mobile communications for the most part was very much a premium early adopter phenomenon for people who really needed it in some form and/or didn't much care about the cost. Satellite was like that and is only now slowly changing.

Makes me wonder if we will not end up using AI for the most unexpected things too ...

> charges that would seem extortionate today.

... per-minute voice, for example.-

In 1970, car phones were available. Reporters had them, as did police. The instrument was a familiar black, Bakelite phone hooked up to a radio.

It would actually be extremely cheap, since it would last only 1 charge (if it came pre-charged), no connectivity, no way to export anything it does (not even print a photo).

After 24h literally more useless than a rock as a phone wouldn't even work as a thing to bang other things on.

If it did happen to have a solar charger, still pretty useless, except for the camera (if available).

With or without charger?

PS. With our without charging grid? (etc., etc., ...)

Logic would posit that market forces would adjust the price, or that proceses would adjust to match demand.-

Market forces can't (sustainably) adjust price to less than the cost of production. They can spur process and other improvements to reduce cost but that does take time and isn't always possible, especially in the near-term.

Thanks. Makes perfect sense.-

PS. One thing I have always found fascinating - obvious as it might be - is that paper (and paper in large, sufficiently cheap industrial quantities) was a prerequisite for the printing press "revolution" to take place ...

I also would bet a "sacred book" of some sort also worked as a prerequisite, because the demand was huge, making the crude initial implementation profitable. In absence of some sort of sacred book that made the same standard text of interest for almost 100% of the literate population, the second best alternative probably would have too limited runs to make it profitable.

> I also would bet a "sacred book" of some sort also worked as a prerequisite

What you point out is fascinating, and probably right ...

PS. I am wondering if "any sufficiently popular" book might not have done the trick, beyond just "sacred" texts - one of the many knightly tales than making the round, for example.-

s/than/then

Gutenberg invented the printing press so he could cheaply print indulgences and sell them and get rich.

Technology trees are definitely a thing. The answer to "Could the Romans have invented an arbitrary fairly modern thing?" is almost always no because they would also have needed a bunch of other resources and inventions that didn't exist yet (and which they might have had little interest in pursuing given that they had plenty of cheap labor, etc.)

Look at electric cars. We've had them longer than ICE cars but they've never really been viable for most cases up until recently. It's not like we just realized we could run a car on electric motors, it's that battery technology has only recently gotten good enough that we can pull a lot of power from them for a long time before they go dead. Improvements in electronics have reduced the size and inefficiency of the components necessary to charge the batteries too. Trying to charge a Tesla off a gigantic linear power supply would be ridiculous.

The people building DIY electric cars in the 90s were using lead acid batteries charged with very slow trickle chargers, not because they were ignorant, they just didn't have access to the better technology we have now. People 50 years with some sort of cold fusion battery from now will look at our crude electric cars running on chemical batteries and laugh.

Paper, interestingly enough, is a good counterexample to this. Paper takes little more than a way to make fine cellulose strands, and a fine-mesh screen, both of which the Romans were more than capable of.

The demand was there as well, Romans imported papyrus from their warmer colonies and went through a lot of it. They also used parchment, but it was expensive, a lot of writing ended up being done on reusable wax tablets.

Paper was invented when the Western Roman Empire was still extant, and while the Chinese could fairly be said to have had a technological edge over the Romans at the time, it's dubious that said edge played a direct role in the invention. It just, didn't happen.

I agree with the general sentiment, and wouldn't call paper "fairly modern" either. But given the topic, it seemed worth a mention.

I've idly thought a lot about that. I reasoned that the most effective thing you could do was invent paper and a printing press.

Ah, were the Romans to have had antibiotics, eh?

Some health-related things are an area where important advances could probably have happened earlier in principle: germ theory of disease, importance of sanitation, some relatively simple advances like antibiotics... All seem doable in principle relative to inventing a lot of 19th century industrial revolution devices.

ADDED: The Romans did apparently have some knowledge of antibiotics without presumably understanding the mechanisms or refining them. Per Wikipedia and other sources: "Antibiotics have been used since ancient times. Many civilizations used topical application of moldy bread, with many references to its beneficial effects arising from ancient Egypt, Nubia, China, Serbia, Greece, and Rome."

From the spinning wheel, to plentiful rags, to cotton paper, to the printing press.-

> ADDED: The Romans did apparently have some knowledge of antibiotics

Fascinating. Worth looking into.-

Sometimes, all it took was one person noticing something (midwives who wash their hands post partum tend to have better outcomes, farmers near cows get less sick, or not at all ...)

... but, you raise another good point: First principles, the search for the facts. Benefits at scale come with, consistently, wanting to go from observation, to general principles, to particular application, to mass application ...

... and, maybe, it took rational thought and the scientific method to get there.-

- https://www.folger.edu/blogs/collation/writing-paper-expensi...

Not sure why https://www.rpvl.cz/en/ was at the top but we've changed the URL to that now. Thanks!

Au contraire. Appreciated.-

TLDR: no according to this source

Reply on news.ycombinator.com