From: Carl Weese (cweese@earthlink.net)
Date: 04/26/02-07:41:58 AM Z
This is interesting. A few years ago I had a wonderful guided tour of
facilities at Crane Paper, including the plant that makes their luxurious
all-cotton stationery material. You can see that it was built many decades
ago, and the technology has hardly changed, since it doesn't need to. The
usual Crane watermark that interferes with making hand coated prints bigger
than 5x7 on this paper can be replaced by a watermark naming one's mega law
firm or other business interested in fancy letter paper and willing to buy
10,000 pounds at a time. There was a rack of spindles with prestigious logos
embedded in the wire. Also, aside from looking like a well-kept region in
one of Dante's hells, the smell was quite awful and I was told that was
because the run going on today used flax, not cotton (oil painters will know
that cotton makes canvas, while flax makes linen). I'd have to find my notes
to see what the cotton/flax difference makes for papers.---Carl
--
web site with picture galleries
and workshop information at:
http://home.earthlink.net/~cweese/
----------
From: CCBaggett@aol.com
To: alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca
Christine,
I grew up in Eastern North Carolina and worked in a paper mill to
earn money for college. You can't smell it inside. All the Sulfur compounds
rise up out of the digesters where the wood chips are converted to pulp.
However, when you walk outside at 6:00 in the morning after the graveyard
shift, the odor hits you in the face like a board. They had a big car wash
for all the cars to drive through on the way out to get the crud off. My
Mother made me take my clothes off on the back porch before she would let me
in the house. On the positive side, the softwoods that are used for wood
pulp mature in 15 to 20 years so with proper forestry it is a renewable
resource. There remain, of course, the Sulfur compounds to deal with.
Cheers,
Charlie
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