Waltham Words: Time and Materials

By Alex Green, Guest Columnist

The other day I passed by a couple of people sitting outside a cafe. I heard one say to the other, "So it's a device where you read a book off a screen? And it's called a what?" I passed by before I heard the word "Kindle". Not a week goes by in my bookstore without mention of Amazon's electronic book reader, and I have struggled to make my case that every generation fears the loss of physical books, but they never disappear. Again and again my words have failed me as I attempt to say that books are very difficult to destroy and tremendously politically relevant, but that comment is often construed by people as conspiratorial in its tone. Nonetheless, this week the brief mention of a paper mill in the caption beneath a photograph by Waltham photographer Frank Maloney kindled (forgive an easy pun) a different way for me to discuss this issue.

From the first settling of the Americas onward, Boston has been home to the most printers and bookbinders in the country. In the quarter century before the Revolutionary War began, roughly two-thirds of all printers in America were based in Boston and its surrounding communities. The next largest community of printers was in Philadelphia, the other philosophical center of the Revolution.

Both before and after the war, the colonies and country were beset by shortages of rags and other supplies to make paper. The Massachusetts and Pennsylvanian colonies were the first to grant special permits for the construction of paper mills and the men who financed their inception became the wealthy elites of colonial high society.

Paper was an essential commodity throughout the 1700's because it was needed for the printing of news and newly created banknotes. Paper making was, as Lyman Weeks writes in his 1916 history of paper-making in America, "regarded as a sort of public utility", and so just as the construction of Grand Central Station captured the nation's attention over a century later, the construction of Eden Vale, a massive paper mill on the Charles River in Waltham, was a source of pride and wonder across the Commonwealth in the early 1780s.

Demand for paper was high, and the pastoral falls in Waltham were a potential source for rapid, powerful growth of manufacturing in America. In the span of fifteen years, three paper mills were constructed along the river in Waltham. The last paper mill constructed was built by Christopher Gore, a wealthy politician who became the governor of Massachusetts.

Paper making consumed a large amount of cotton and in 1803, Eden Vale became the Boston Manufacturing Company, the first cotton mill in Massachusetts. Within two decades it would become the first fully industrialized mill in America, and the building exists to this day, housing the Waltham Mills Artists and the Charles River Museum of Industry.

The idea that all of American industry stems from the production of paper makes it slightly less crass when I say that books will not disappear because they are durable, and that durability means they will survive overt attempts to destroy them as well as your morning cup of coffee when it tips over and cascades over the pages . In either situation they outlast the Kindle because they are uniquely brilliant inventions. Often we attempt to make aesthetic arguments for the survival of things which are pleasing to us for the aggravations they do not cause, and the simple utilitarian beauty we do not have to praise. What I mean to say when I describe the impossibility of the death of books is that relevance is not a fad, and advanced technology is very new. The production of books may change, may reduce in size, and may be in flux for generations, but their positive (and non-conspiratorial) relevance to the development of an entire city and nation means they have a long life yet to live.

Alex Green is the owner of Back Pages Books and editor of Back Pages Publishers, both located on Moody Street in Waltham.