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.
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.
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.)
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
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!"
PS. This tangentially raises an interesting question: Did the American Depression generally have worldwide economic consequences?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression#Socio-economi...
Deleted Comment
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.
(And chemicals ...)
Was early modern writing paper expensive? (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20559968 - July 2019 (4 comments)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=-XoTGFC-0NA&pp=ygUrQ29ubmVjdGlvb...
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.
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.
Economics happens at the margin.
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 ...
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.
Those habits rubbed off on me, and I still have a box of scrap paper I 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.
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.
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.
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).