![]() Snagsby, the law-stationer in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, we get a glimpse of this tidal wave of 19th-century office supplies: (No wonder Melville’s famously reticent scrivener, Bartleby, was forever intoning “I would prefer not to.” *) And in the shop of Mr. This was a new sort of of urgent but essentially meaningless work. ![]() These clerks were often surrounded by papers that had to be sorted into cubbyholes or tied into bundles with string. As Adrian Forty points out in Objects of Desire: Design and Society Since 1750, the clerk was a creature of uncertain status, someone who had attained a middle-class respectability but who frequently lacked both managerial responsibility and a middle-class salary: Think of Bob Cratchit in A Christmas Carol, working endless hours for a thankless boss. The figure most responsible for the creation and care of all this paperwork was the clerk. In the 19th century, the invention of wood pulping and industrial paper mills made inexpensive paper widely available the rise of commerce, bureaucracy, and literacy transformed it into masses of loose sheets of paperwork. Temporary writing-tracking Sumerian accounts payable or inviting a friend to a birthday party in Pompeii-was done in clay or wax tablets that could be wiped clean and reused. ![]() (Some contemporary paper is still made this way most currency is printed on it.) This rag paper was expensive to produce, so it was primarily reserved for permanent writing and sewn into bound volumes. When it was developed in China in the first century A.D., paper was made from cotton and linen.
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