was defined by a different name. This cotton card or cotton paper was thick, coarse, woolly, yellow and somewhat fragile. It was so inferior to papyrus, parchment or linen paper as a writing surface, and was so generally neglected by professional copyists, that all the earlier chroniclers of paper-making have passed it by as unworthy of notice.
The linen paper, so called, came in use at a much later period, but there is great disagreement among authorities as to the date. Meerman, the author of a learned book on the origin of printing, offered a reward for the earliest manuscript on linen paper, which, he decided, could not have been used in Europe before 1270. Montfaucon, a learned antiquary, says that he could find no book nor leaf of linen paper of earlier date, but he thinks that it was known and used in Europe to a limited extent before 1270. Gibbon, citing the authority of Arabian historians, says that a linen paper was made in Samarcand in the eighth century, and leaves his reader to form the inference that not long after, paper found its way to Europe. Casiri, a Spanish author, who made a catalogue of the Arabian manuscripts in the Escurial, says that in this collection are many old manuscripts of the twelfth century on linen paper, including one of the year 1100. But we are not told that this paper was made in Spain; it may have been brought from the East. Tiraboschi, an Italian historian, says that linen paper is the invention of an Italian, Pace de Fabiano of Treviso, who flourished about the middle of the fourteenth century. But Peter Mauritius, abbot of a French monastery at Cluny, in a treatise written by him in 1120 against the Jews, says, "The books we read every day are made of the skins of sheep, goats and calves [parchment], of oriental plants [papyrus], or of the scrapings of old rags, or of any other compacted refuse material."[1] It would be a hopeless task to attempt to gather from these discordant
- ↑ The phrase ex rasuris veterum pannorum, here translated as the scrapings of old rags, has been construed by many authors as linen paper, in opposition to the "compacted refuse material," which is supposed to be cotton, or, at least, a mixture of cotton and cordage.
