Thread by @dbellingradt

A scene of paper management and usages: an European early modern tax office was full of papers. Fresh paper sheets, old paper sheets, printed papers, handwritten papers, waste papers, etc. Let's have a deeper look, #paperhistory. A next thread,
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Managing information became a paper business in Early Modern Europe. The expanding administration practices made secretaries, lawyer's offices, tax offices, etc. And they ran on paper, had to store paper, and deal with paper. It was a paper world.

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Let's focus on the details. This painted mocking scene is rich of details for #bookhistory and #paperhistory. So many paper usages imagined here.
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Bags, bags, bags. Bags full of documents were literally bags full of paper. These bags could be seen hanging in administration buildings, and they were a mobile storage system. And apparently, some were lying on the floor, some were bigger than others, etc.

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Welcome to the bag system. Your favorite paper storing solution.



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Writing and accounting was a necessity in administration. All these records are handwritten documents, with ink, inkpot and quill. Imagine yourself as a paper worker. Working with a quill quietly ignoring the surrounding everyday's noise...

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Unfinished (paper) business. Welcome to your administration experience full of waiting papers in chaotic orders: comments, petitions, proofs, letters of all kinds, testimonies, you name it. If it was relevant for a tax office, it was on paper. All of it. A paper madness.

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Waste paper? Yes, when drafts became useless, letters outdated, papers turned vastly and steadily into used papers. And these leftovers formed and fueled the material production of new papers the paper trdae was waiting for. Early modern Europe was an age of paper recycling.
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Your nowadays paperless office was around 1600 in Europe a paperfull workplace. The more important you were, the more paper sheets, bundles, letters, etc. were lying right in front of you. Want to make a paper career? Train suspicious reading holding many papers!
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Some extra details of importance: firstly, a used quill on the floor, this indicates the hectic workflow of the tax office. When writers were busy, (goose) quills fell to the floor. This detail is not by chance.

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A paper sheet glued to a (broken?) window glass. What is this about? The layout indicates: this is not a broadsheet or a print. It is a handwritten paper sheet. Broadsheets were often glued or pinned to walls and wooden doors, but this is new to me.



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Almanacs! These prints were produced in high quantities and reached very large audiences, and they were a characteristic part of the contemporary media ensemble. A paper artefact.
Here we see a glued version of a single-sheet "wall almanac" (German: Wandkalender).

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But what is missing on this painting from a paper perspective? You would expect fresh papers waiting to be used. But where are the empty pages in account books and the fresh paper sheets to produce new paper flows for more administrative steps?



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And this threads ends here, good night. Thank you for your attention. If you like these threads, check with #paperhistory in my Twitter history. There are some more.

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