Before paper was invented, information was recorded on various surfaces such as clay tablets, papyrus rolls, stone, bamboo or wood block. Parchment was made from the untanned skins of sheep and goats, vellum from calfskin.

Paper was invented in China around the first century AD by Chinese court official Cai Lun, who made his paper by mixing finely chopped mulberry bark, hemp rags and old fish netting with water, mashing it flat, and then pressing out the water and letting it dry in the sun. Paper gets its name from papyrus; the writing material made in Ancient Egypt from the pith of the papyrus plant.

Nowadays, paper is made mainly from wood pulp or recycled paper products. Other sources are bamboo, elephant dung, straw, sugar cane, hemp and jute. High quality paper for bank notes, security certificates, wedding invitations etc is made from cotton and linen.

The word ‘paper’ is part of many of our expressions:

Paperchase is administration characterised by excessive bureaucracy, from the cross-country race in which runners follow a trail marked by torn-up paper.

Paper trail is the total amount of written evidence of a person’s activities. Paper tiger is one who appears threatening but is really quite powerless.

To paper something over is to disguise an awkward problem. To get it down on paper is to have an official written record and when it’s not worth the paper it’s written on, that document is not valid.

Will the move into the digital age spell the end of paper? Back in the 1970s, the ‘paperless office’ was predicted, with all record handling to be purely electronic by the 1990s. Well that certainly hasn’t happened. While paper tickets are often replaced with digital travel cards, passports are still made of paper. Many people prefer to read an actual book rather than the digital version.

Just as well – imagine not being able to make a paper aeroplane when you’re bored at a meeting!

Happy Puzzling!