Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill was the first private house to be built in the Gothic style, begun in 1747 it’s battlements were, bizarrely, made of papier mâché which had to be re-installed each time it rained.
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Nuri Demirag, one of the first tycoons of the young Turkish Republic, built his fortune on the cigarette paper trade. In 1919, Nuri Bey resigned from his civil service post and launched his first business venture with capital of 56 Ottoman gold liras.
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From a basement in New York, Joseph Cornell channelled his limitless imagination into some of the most original art of the 20th century. Imaginary voyages began as he searched Manhattan’s antique bookshops curating a vast archive of paper ephemera and small objects to make his signature glass-fronted shadow boxes.
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Karen Blixen had style, both in life and art – it compelled her. She had a contempt for the timid, the solid, the everyday. She drew an analogy between the process of making consommé and that of telling stories: ''The recipe calls for you to keep the spirit but to discard the substance of your rough ingredients: eggshells and raw bones, root vegetables and red meat.
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In Japan, paper has a rich and romantic history often imbued with unexpected ritual and literary significance. Japanese Samurai warriors were expected to carry a few folded sheets of Washi, traditional paper, tucked into the front folds of his kimono.
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In 1700, the artist Mary Delany discovered collage. At the age of 72, Mary was struck by how closely a piece of red paper on her bedside table resembled a geranium and took up her scissors. “I have invented a new way of imitating flowers,” she wrote.
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During the Age of the Enlightenment in France, the dominotiers’ guild printed ornate motifs on 35 x 45 cm paper sheets using engraved plates and applying colour with stencils. These decorative sheets of paper were called “dominos”.
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‘Save the Pieces’ is a tiny, broken enamel found on the floor of the long-abandoned workshop of artworkmen F R Leach & Sons, a once-prosperous company which supplied artisan artists to decorate churches, stately homes, palaces and private houses.
Read Moretears soiled her paper gown
for he tore her paper heart
into little pieces
with his paper love
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