Question from a Reader: I have found a great deal of information on the web about writing utensils, but the information about paper during the Regency era primarily centers on letter-writing and general discussions of the high cost and methods used to avoid waste.

Given all that, what was used for general household list-making? Specifically, I have a heroine who is compiling a to-do list of areas that need to be addressed in a neglected estate to bring it up to snuff, but I envision she would use in that circumstance whatever method would have been usual for internal household business such as menu planning, party guest lists, shopping lists, etc. Would paper and pencil have been used for this? If not, what else? If anyone has a resource to recommend, I would be grateful!

Answer: Okay, I have really not researched paper that well, but I do have a bit of information in my Regency Tidbits file that I will share and attempt to give credit where it is due. In the file, I generally note who provided me the information.

First, I am quoting Andrea Penrose from a post over on Goodreads. Andrea used some of this information in her Murder on Black Swan Lane (which is a great historical mystery, by the way).

“So let’s take a quick look at some of the historical highlights of paper making in Great Britain during the Georgian and Regency eras. Until the late 19th century, when wood pulp became the primary source for mass market printing, paper was made of plant fiber, with linen and cotton fibers being the most common. Ragmen collected scraps of cloth, which were sold to paper mills. These were washed to rid them of dirt and foreign matter, then soaked in large vats where they were, as the old saying goes, pounded to a pulp!

“Until the 18th century, stampers—large metal-clad lengths of wood—were worked by hand to reduce the rags to a slurry of fibers (Imagine the muscles of a paper stamper!) The hollander (named as such because it was invented in Holland) took tech to a new level. It was a drum with a wooden roller in its center that was bristling with knifelike blades. The hollander was rotated in a vat of soaking rags, and reduced them to pulp much faster than the old method. (Steam power further improved productivity.) But as is usual with progress, not everything was for the better. Hollanders cut the rag fibers to very short length, while stamping produced long fibers, which made for a stronger paper.

“From there, the pulp was then put in a paper mold—wooden frames with a screen set inside it. The pulp embedded in the screen and the water drained away (Leveling the pulp quickly and efficiently was an art!) After a first stage of drying, the sheet was placed on a felt pad—the papermaker would interleaf maybe two dozen sheets of paper and felt together before placed the stack in a press to squeeze out the remaining water.

“The earliest type of screen was a grid fine horizontal wires held together by regularly spaced vertical wires or threads of horsehair, which produced “laid” paper. The surface tended to be a little irregular and was hard to print on. In 1757, James Whatman the Elder invented a screen that looks very much like our modern window screens. It produced a finer texture paper, which was called “wove” paper. (Today, Whatman paper is still one of the top brands of high quality paper, and is a favorite of watercolor artists.)

“As a final step, the sheets were hung to dry completely before being packaged for sale. As mentioned, paper was not inexpensive—while we routinely buy reams of paper for our printers, Jane Austen and her contemporaries would more often buy far less. The most common package was a quire, which consisted of 24 sheets.

“One of the interesting things I discovered was that in 1800, the paper making industry was using nearly 24 million pounds of rags annually to produce 10,000 tons of paper in England and Wales, and imported cloth scraps were needed to keep up with demand. The shortage of rags prompted experiments with other materials, such as sawdust, rye straw and cabbage stumps, but it wasn’t until the middle of the 19th century that wood pulp became a viable alternative to rag paper.”

Nancy Mayer Researcher tells us: ‘There was a rough sort of paper one used for making lists and ordinary notes. It was to be used with pencils, charcoal, or crayons because ink would go right through. There was rough wrapping paper—brown paper for parcels type, and all the expensive paper for letter writing and invitations.

The paper the mistress of the house would use for menu planing would be different from that used by the cook or housekeeper when they noted what supplies were needed or what was going out in the laundry. There were many different qualities of paper around and a well-stocked house would have them all.

Bronwyn Clarke tells us: The mistress of the house might well use an old notebook or ledger book that had been used by someone else but only part-filled.

I studied a small notebook (pocketbook?) in Yorkshire that had originally been used by clothier John Gibson to record cloth received from weavers and payments made; he subsequently fell ill and died, and someone else used it to record amounts paid to his wife and daughters for their upkeep; however, there were also a few other assorted lists and notes in the book.

Barbara Johnson used an old ledger book and pasted in her fabric samples and fashion plates over the previous owner’s financial records – you can find images of this in the Victoria and Albert Museum website.

From Nancy Mayer: A copy of Johnson’s project was sold some years ago. The fabric samples are only photographs now, but it is still interesting. The book is oversized– more the size of legal paper.

Bronwyn Clarke tells us: It’s out of print now, but the V&A Museum does have photographs of each page in their online catalogue, which is a great resource.