Writing in 1854, Dr. Deck envisioned a “famine of paper material looming up in the distance.” And where there is famine, there is money to be made. On a trip to Jamaica, prospecting for copper, Deck had taken time to evaluate several possible rag substitutes — aloe, plantain, banana, and dagger-grass — but none was satisfactory. Several generations of papermakers12 before him had experimented with alternative “furnishes” for their product. Bamboo waste, old rope, corncobs, grass, and straw were important American pulp additives; European research had roamed farther afield. Jacob Christian Schäffer, an authority on the fungi of Bavaria, had attempted, in a series of works in the seventeen-seventies, to make paper from potatoes (both the skins and the insides), dandelion roots, cabbage stumps, thistles, grapevines, lilies of the valley, and Bavarian peat — but none of his papierstoffen found favor in commercial mills. An Englishman named Hill produced, in 1854, a paper made from horseradish;13 also one from manure, “bleached and reduced to pulp by the usual modes.”
Pulpwood chips or sawdust had held promise ever since 1719, when René de Réaumur, a scholar of insects, observed to the Academie Royale that certain American wasps make excellent paper from trees — they “seem to invite us14 to try.” But only in Asia did arboreal paper have a long tradition: the Japanese used the beaten inner bark of the mulberry to produce a medium of enviable durability. A few wood-pulp practitioners claimed success in America: the October 28, 1830, issue of the Crawford Messenger, published in Meadville, Pennsylvania, was reportedly printed on paper made from lime and aspen wood. When Dard Hunter, the eminent twentieth-century paper historian, wrote his Papermaking, there was a set of bound volumes of the Crawford Messenger at the library of Allegheny College in Meadville. A librarian there wrote Hunter that the issue of the Messenger for that day looked and felt smoother than the others in the volume: “All the other edges are frayed, stained, or creased while this one is clear cut as if it had been shaped with shears.” Hunter proposed taking a sample of the paper to test whether it had wood pulp, but his request was refused: “The librarians,” Hunter wrote, “are reluctant to spare even a fragment15 of the paper for this purpose.”
When I called the Allegheny College library to ask after the October 28, 1830, issue of the Crawford Messenger, I was told that it was gone. There is a run of the Messenger on microfilm, but a shrunken picture of a page can’t reveal much about the composition of its paper. And the particular set of the newspaper that the microfilmers laid out under the camera had lacked certain issues, including the one for October 28, 1830—the Ace comb problem again. Are there any originals left? The Library of Congress owns one original volume of the Messenger, for 1828—they kept a lot of newspapers printed before 1870. (Several years ago, however, they did give away, to the American Antiquarian Society, a number of runs from states with letters that come early in the alphabet; they planned to give away more, but there were protests, and the project was dropped.) And the American Antiquarian Society itself holds a few scattered issues, but not the one supposedly made of lime and aspen. There is, however, at least one remaining set, at the Crawford County Historical Society. Rose Deka, a librarian there, told me that the October 28, 1830, issue is still in “excellent condition.” Thanks to libraries like hers, which keep what they own, the physical history and durability of early wood-pulp paper is still a subject that can be studied, just barely.
But circa 1847, when Dr. Deck made a trip to Egypt in search of Cleopatra’s lost emerald mines, wood-pulp paper was by no means a sure thing. Deck enjoyed digging things up — he fancied himself something of an archaeologist as well as a prospector. (He had written about some Anglo-Saxon relics for the Archeological Review.) His father had known Giovanni Belzoni, the famous Egyptian-tomb plunderer, and thus Deck had inherited a few interesting items, including a piece of mummy linen of a “remarkably delicate texture.” Though the expedition to Egypt was a failure — no emerald mines turned up — the explorers did encounter some major “mummy pits,” as Deck called them. Where the winds had scoured the plains of sand, Deck reported that he had seen “fragments and limbs exposed in such plenty and variety that the wanderer would be impressed with the idea that he was in the studio of a Frankenstein, in an extensive line of business.”
He made some calculations. Assume two thousand years of widespread embalming, an average life span of thirty-three years, and a stable Nilotic population of eight million people. That left you with five hundred million mummies, just “rotting in the ground.” The numbers were “incredible.” What to do with that many mummies? How might an enlightened Western visitor best put them to use?
We could set them on fire, of course. In H. Rider Haggard’s novel She, mummies are used as torches — the bituminous preservatives burn so fiercely that “flames would literally spout16 out of the ears and mouth in tongues of fire a foot or more in length.” Combustion this intense could generate steam. The railroad from Cairo to Alexandria, imposed on the Abbas Pasha by the English in the early 1850s, runs through several bustling necropolises; Egypt had no indigenous coal and very little wood. A small item in the September 27, 1859, edition of the Syracuse Daily Standard reads: “Egypt has 300 miles of railroad. On the first locomotive run, mummies were used for fuel, making a hot fire. The supply of mummies is said to be almost inexhaustible, and are used by the cord.” Dard Hunter’s Papermaking cites an informant’s report that “during a ten-year period the locomotives of Egypt17 made use of no other fuel than that furnished by the well-wrapped, compact mummies.”
But Deck’s geological training convinced him that there was a better way for entrepreneurs to profit from Egypt’s buried resources.18 He estimated that each mummy would yield on average eight pounds of linen, of a quality ideal for modern papermaking; and the “superior class of mummies” would yield much more than that. A mummy from the collection of one Mr. Davidson, Deck reports, was bandaged in nearly three hundred yards of fabric, “which weighed, when bleached, 32 lbs.” You could get dozens of four-page newspapers out of thirty-two pounds of linen. And there would be secondary compensations, as well, since within the layers of linen would reside winged orbs and other bijouterie with resale value; and the distillation of the “animal remains” would produce aromatic gums, such as olibanum, “issoponax,” and ambergris. Even the bituminous compounds employed in the embalming of the “inferior mummies” could be made into varnishes and machinery oils, according to Deck. Mummy soap was another of his suggestions. He possesses, he says, paper samples available for inspection, including banknote and writing stock “of the finest but toughest texture” made from cloth from the tombs of the kings at Thebes.
A preliminary sketch of Deck’s proposal appeared in 1847, in the Spettatore Egiziano, a newspaper overseen by the Abbas Pasha in Cairo. I haven’t been able to track this paper down, but Punch saw the item and produced an anonymous poem about it in the May 29, 1847, issue. “Cheops and Ramses, shake in your cere-cloths!” the poet writes:
They’re going to take the bier-cloths
That wrap the sons and daughters of old Nile,
From gilded kings to rough-dressed rank and file,