Alexander Monro’s THE PAPER TRAIL has been bought at proposal for publication in the UK by Penguin Press and the US by Alfred. A. Knopf.
THE PAPER TRAIL is the story of how a Chinese invention revolutionized written knowledge across Eurasia, from paper’s birth in China two thousand years ago to the printing explosion that galvanised Europe fifteen hundred years later.
It is a journey through politics and religion, a story concerned not with a technology for its own sake but, instead, with the profound impact that technology enjoyed and the possibilities it awakened, as knowledge experienced a series of explosions from East to West. It is a journey of stops and starts, as the knowledge and industry of paper spread in fits through the Abbasid Caliphate to embed the Koran, Koranic commentaries and theological debates in the cultures of the Dar al Islam. Finally, the book explores how the industry of paper twinned with printing in Europe to feed the Renaissance demand for books, and thereby allow Reformation ideas to gain currency, and “heretical” scientific ideas to gain ground as a new knowledge culture emerged, driven by commerce and, in time, a reading public, rather than by Rome.
THE PAPER TRAIL, then, is a story that links three cultural domains and sees in their embrace of paper a common thirst for knowledge – factual, faith-based or manipulated.
23 Apr 2008