I can't help but notice that nobody has yet to take a toot on the second
question about hemp paper being used in the production of Twain's books.

Having made papers by hand out of a wide variety of materials back in the
1970s (including hemp), this question caught my eye, and I've spent a little
time investigating it, and learned virtually nothing new.

If you accept what's out there on the web regarding hemp paper, you'll
probably also want to accept all of those spams about growing certain parts
of your anatomy. According to some, you think hemp has been the prime
ingredient in paper for thousands of years. Well, not exactly.

Up to about 1800 linen rags were the primary source of paper pulp. A
Frenchman invented a machine that allowed for production of machine made
papers in 1799 and the technology spread to England by 1805, and this paved
the way for widespread use of plant fibers in papers by about 1830. While
hemp (we're talking about cannibas sativa, or industrial hemp; not the
high-grade stuff growing deep in certain backwoods and apartment balconies
in northern California) had always been used to produce some of the "cords"
onto which the sheets of a book are sewn before casing (binding), it was not
often used in papermaking until the 19th century, and seldom by itself,
hence you see the terms sisal (or seisal) hemp, manilla hemp, etc. It has a
long fiber, very similar to linen, and cannot be easily distinguished,
certainly not by the nekkid eye, nor even I when fully clothed. Most hemp
papers are thin strong opaque papers rather than the kind of papers used in
printing the texts of books. Also, most handmade papers are made from rag
(linen) rather than hemp. The vast majority of machine papers made in the
19th century were made from plant fibers like wood pulp, esparto grass,
eucalyptus pulp, etc., with china clay, starches, and sizing added --and
rarely hemp. I checked a lot of sources of papermaking (Dard Hunter, David
Mason, Glaister, and a dozen standard works on papermaking) and found very f
ew references to hemp papers. I've also examined the papers used in Twain's
books in my own large collection, including the many handmade papers, and
obscure private printings, and found none that could be traced to hemp.
Tracing particular papers (like the ones used on the infinite editions of
1601 in the 20th century) was tedious and led to dead ends. It is very
likely that the cords on which many of Twain's books were sewn were indeed
made of hemp, but the same could be said for Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman
Melville, most 19th century Bibles, and rope for sale at this moment at a
Home Depot near you.

I thought I should mention this before the Elmira Conference. I'm haunted by
the prosepct of seeing clusters of cross-legged scholars slicing apart Twain
first editions, and conducting research in this field.

Kevin Mac Donnell
Austin TX