John Sutherland
Pulp Non-Fiction
The Paper Trail: An Unexpected History of the World’s Greatest Invention
By Alexander Monro
Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 368pp £20 order from our bookshop
By the universal sod’s law of bus travel, two books on the history of paper have trundled into publication simultaneously. I haven’t read Nicholas A Basbanes’s On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History (smart title), published in the US by Knopf, but it will have to be very good to match up to Alexander Monro’s own everything on the same subject.
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