@tntype @dbellingradt @BiblioWingate @dohanian I found some time yesterday to go over British and American consular trade reports between the 1870s and 1910s and it appears that the majority of printing paper in Bilad al-Sham was imported from Austria-Hungary.
📝 Nouveau billet !
À la recherche des chiffons au fond des douanes de Bologne et dans des terminologies plus ou moins claires...
C'est le retour à la recherche depuis juillet dernier !
Is there any meaningful literature on the paper trade in the late Ottoman Empire (second half of the 19th century onwards) that I might have missed? I tried all keywords I could think of in the common databases for scholarly literature and searched through works on the history of printing and publishing but came up practically empty-handed.
Amy Ayalon, Hala Auji, Titus Nemeth ( @tntype ), and the late Kathryn Schwartz mention paper in passing. The body of literature on watermarks and manuscripts doesn’t help either as this isn’t concerned with the cheap, industrially produced paper for periodical printing I am interested in.
Is there a chance of @dbellingradt or
@BiblioWingate knowing more?
For decades, a cacophony of technological prophets has repeatedly proclaimed the impending end of the paper era. But here we still are, a paper-using humankind.
Agnes Gehbald and me wrote an article about paper in global book cultures.
Our text highlights key stages in the global history of paper used in publishing, and argues that the material histories of a paper-using humankind – coined as paper regimes – from the second century BCE to the present are relevant and crucial to understanding global history: #GlobalBookHistory
"Paper Regimes of the Publishing World: A Bird’s Eye View on the Materiality of Global Book History" is published in open access in the journal Globalgeschichte / Global History, vol. 3.2 (2025), pp. 1-28, https://gg.harrassowitz-library.com/article/gg/2025/2/4
This 1944 comic cover is superb: #Superman, #Batman and Robin are transporting old papers in order to recycle the material resource. The timely slogan "Fight Paper-Waste" is connected to the wartime situation of fighting Hitler and #fascism.
The fight against the "Paper-Hanger of Berlin" is a reference to Hitler (who according to a contemporary rumor worked hanging wall paper as a young man). #PaperHistory is here part of contemporary propaganga.
It was Cardinal George Mundelein of Chicago, who on May 18th 1937, called Hitler "an Austrian paper hanger".
Daniel Bellingradt
Till Grallert
Catherine Rideau-Kikuchi
Daniel Bellingradt