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 War, there were 550 paper manufacturers in the United States, but only 15 of them were in the Confederate states. Newspapers in particular suffered from shortages as the war progressed, and some editions had to be printed on the blank side of unused wallpaper.Basbanes reports that "forgeries of Confederate currency made by Northern provocateurs were superior in every respect to the official notes produced in the South, and thus easily identified as fakes."Basbanes' book is part social history, part investigative reporting into the many roles and uses of paper "” which by book's end have come to seem universal. How many books do you know that can incorporate the Sepoy Mutiny in India, the public acceptance of the sanitary napkin, the battle of Gettysburg and the workings of the National Security Agency into one coherent narrative? Mainly, though, On Paper is a travel book, conducted by the most amiable and civilized of guides: up the steep mountains of southwestern China where the purest water (an essential to papermaking) can be found and where families of papermakers have passed down their art for centuries; into the subterranean vault of the Folger Shakespeare Library, where 82 of the world's 232 surviving copies of Shakespeare's First Folio are shelved flat "like so many bars of gold bullion" behind a barred steel door; to an insider chat with Argo operative Tony Mendez, who recounts the rescue of six Americans from Iran in 1980 from the standpoint of identity fabrication and makes a fascinating distinction between forgery and counterfeiting, which is "an act of war."What proves most fascinating here isn't the making of paper but the booming industry of "secure document destruction."Basbanes reviews the shredding history of the Pentagon Papers, the Enron and Iran-Contra scandals, and the 6 million files on the private lives of East German citizens gathered by the Stasi prior to 1989, and concludes:"If there is a lesson to be learned in all of this it is that total security is assured only by burning or," in the instance of America's National Security Agency, "on-site pulping."Basbanes' visit to the NSA's pulping facility in Fort Meade, Md., took seven months to be approved, and NSA officials were clearly bemused to be questioned on this particular aspect of their operations. NSA pulps 100 million documents a year, down 30 percent since the 1980s and early '90s, allowing it to truck in another 6 million pounds from neighboring intelligence agencies. This approach, "has the residual effect of being environmentally responsible," Basbanes says, noting NSA's website claim that it saves 2,200 Southern pines a year. The pulp, "its prior life as bearer of sensitive government information entirely erased," goes on to make egg cartons and pizza boxes -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.