“The first rag paper seems to have originated in one of the early imperial courts of China, when a clerk, Ts’ai Lun, in A.D. 105, concocted a formula out of fishnets, old rags, hemp waste, and parts of the mulberry bush.

Pleased with the relatively smooth, flexible product, the Chinese continued to use the formula, modifying it in time. But paper moved westward at a snail’s pace; it reached Cental Asia only in 751 and Baghdad in 793.

The arrival of paper in Asia Minor put the brown rag material (for it had yet to be bleached) on Europe’s back doorstep, and the Islamic culture eventually introduced paper production techniques to the Europeans by the 14th century. Paper mills soon flourished in Spain, Italy, France, and Germany, and with the invention of printing in the 1450s, the demand for paper skyrocketed.”

—Charles Panati, The Browser’s Book of Beginnings, 1984.