Book description
The Paper Trail tells the story of how a simple Chinese product has for two millennia allowed knowledge, ideas and religions to spread at an unprecedented rate around the world. Alexander Monro traces this groundbreaking invention's voyage, beginning with the Buddhist translators responsible for its spread across China and Japan,…
Why read it?
1 author picked The Paper Trail as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Monro draws our attention to China and Islam and provides evidence of the spread of the Kingdom of Paper later in the 10th Century to China where millions were using Chinese pulp paper for money, scrolls, and other products.
He presents a detailed history of writing in China and the use of early media, esp. silk, and bamboo strips. Paper, whatever it was made of and wherever it appeared, was a writing surface cheap, portable, and printable enough that books and pamphlets began to be mass-produced and to travel more widely through the world from the time of Cheops’…
From John's list on The best books on the history of paper.
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