Like Kurlansky's other books on a commodity, this ends up being a full spectrum tour of human communications, religion, art and commerce, centered around the material culture of paper. There is nothing new here, but with a global sweep, Kurlansky explains how, depending on your material (mulberry bark, cotton, wood pulp, papyrus) and your purpose (shoji screens, scrolls, sketchpad, bureaucratic forms), you get different ends, with artifact lives of their own.