Scope and Contents DAVID WALTON Review on interent: Nicholas Basbanes is an especially congenial writer, a quality he displayed memorably in A Gentle Madness, his 1999 history of book collecting and collectors. He does it again most pleasurably in On Paper, a wide-ranging investigation into the "everything" of that ubiquitous and indispensable construction of cellulose fibers whose history paralleled "” and made possible "” the rise of civilization.On Paper, true to its double-duty title, isn't a history of papermaking, though Basbanes tracks the process from its discovery in China a century or two B.C., east into Japan and Korea, west in the eighth century to Arabia, where the Koran had been recited from memory for a hundred years, to Spain in the 11th century, to Italy in the 13th, where it spurred the Renaissance, then to North America in 1690 "” and now, everywhere.As a prism into history, the role of paper offers a unique and often defining perspective. For example, at the start of the Civil...