Timothy Barrett is old school. Like, 105 A.D. old school.
He is a papermaker, and his paper is some of the finest in the world. It has been used to repair documents like the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence. Working out of his University of Iowa workshop, which is housed in the laundry facility of an old sanitarium, Barrett works diligently, crafting remarkably luxurious yet austere paper out of the bark of the kozo tree, a Japanese relative to the Western mulberry. This paper is known as washi. Aptly paper-thin but almost impossibly strong, this formidable end product is achieved through a centuries-old process of breaking down plant fibers into pulp, then allowing them to re-bond into a sheet, producing what is known in the craft as “true paper”. Barrett’s, painstakingly reconstituted, is some of the truest.
Mark Levine, is his New York Times article, “Can A Papermaker Help to Save Civilization”, details Barrett’s unusually complex ritual. He begins by harvesting the kozo, a task for which he enlists a number of his students to assist. The cut and bundled branches of the shrub are then placed into a large cauldron and steamed to ease the stripping of its bark. The bark is then hung and dried only to be rehydrated and stripped further, to an inner layer known as the “green layer”. This layer is dried and rehydrated and stripped again, revealing the “white bark”, the part of the kozo tree that Barrett is after. The yield is about 12.5-to-1 pounds, meaning to produce a decent amount of paper Barrett needs a lot of kozo.
But his pursuit has apparent value to more than just students, historians and paper connoisseurs. The majority of Barrett’s funding comes a MacArthur Fellowship and a number of grants, along with consistent commissions from some of the nation’s most prestigious historical archives, such as the Library of Congress and the National Archives, and when examining a work repaired with Barrett’s paper, it is immediately apparent why.
When laid upon a sheet of his washi, the blend of the original work and it’s new, but antiquated counterpart, is uncanny, “but if you kind of turn your head sideways and squint, you can see it,” says Barrett, with an awareness of his work inherent only to a true artist, one who creates by hand, with love and care, one piece at a time.
Barrett began making paper as an undergrad at Antioch, where he was the consummate young artist, dabbling in everything from sculpture to stained-glass-window making, but his original paper rig was far more primitive. Using a drill, he pulped raw cotton linters in a garbage can, mixing in various dyes bought from the local grocery store.
He later met a pair of sisters, also amateur papermakers, who intended on opening a paper studio in Indiana. Barrett signed on immediately, working as apprentice. The bulk of the trio’s output was art paper, favored by immortals like Jasper Johns, but art paper did not appeal to Barrett. To Barrett, the paper was art.
Backed by a Fulbright grant, he traveled to Japan in search of washi and its artisans. He knew nothing of the culture or the language, but traveled in search of leads on where paper was being made. Soon, he found it, and slowly learned how to ask all the right questions, earning little by little the trust of the suspicious and confused craftsmen under whom he cut his young teeth.
When Barrett returned to the U.S., he occupied a small barn on his parents’ property and set about building his own authentic equipment from sketches he had made during his tenure in Japan. The rest was, as they say, history.
But how, one may ask, does a man like Timothy Barrett fit into the digital age? Does he chafe? Is he adrift, his workshop his ship, in a binary sea of transient text, dropping anchor into seabed at once of uncertain depth and ever diminishing beneath?
Or could this humble Zen-master of paper, as Levine hypothesizes, change the very landscape of print and, thus, the world at-large?
Bob Stein, the founder of The Institute for the Future of the Book, asserts that, “ in terms of the electronic book, we are in 1464—the infancy of Gutenberg’s press”. Could the digital world evolve in such a way that it necessitates paper, and a man (or mind) like Barrett’s, to survive? Will we always crave the sensation of the artist’s hand? Or is Barrett old news?
Barrett contemplates this very idea in Levin’s article. “Sometimes I worry that handmade books and paper are going the way of the horse-drawn carriage, and that I’m one of those enthusiasts who get really into making replicas of buggies. But I don’t think so. Paper is a big part of who we are. I like to imagine someone falling in love, and writing a note to his sweetheart on a piece of well-made paper. It’s got to be more meaningful than sending an e-mail.”
He picks up a book from the twelfth century to further illustrate his point. “Look, you can see fine lines from the way the threads were sewn down on the mold. And here, if you hold it up in raking light, you can see where someone in the mill picked up the edge of the sheet. I love these little touches of the hand.” He flips pages to examine the librarian’s notes. “Mended in the spine with paper from Barrett’s shop.”
As long as there is history worth remembering, there is paper worth making, and perhaps as long as there are people making history, there is paper that can make it, or revive it, too.
