This article considers how the realities of hand papermaking framed the search for a papermaking machine. The manufacturers longed for a device that would sever the links joining the journeymen's skills, custom, and familiar output, and produce vastly more paper. The absence of an industrious revolution in papermaking and the modest contributions of the industrial Enlightenment to the trade intensified this drive. A mechanized mimic of the journeymen's skills, the papermaking machine put an end

more »

... to their mechanical art. lit n 1989, Bruce Laurie, a distinguished American historian, published a volume entitled "Artisans Into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America"' The title reveals Laurie's vision of the "great transformation" that turned independent, petty producers into machine tenders. Throughout Europe and America, however, journeymen paperworkers had always been "factory artisans". Despite the manufacturers' reliance on skilled men and their mastery, hand papermaking was a capitalist industry cloaked in a corporate idiom. Neither E. P. Thompson's depiction of the moral economy of the marketplace, nor Jan de Vries's account of a new market orientation in worker households captures the trade's social relations of production.2 The journeymen fashioned reams for markets rather than for their own use, and invariably did so under the watchful gaze of a millmaster. They depended on wages as well as the provision of food. Nevertheless, paperworkers across Europe still spoke of masters, journeymen, and apprentices, recognized standards for proper entry into each rank, and celebrated their brothers' passage up the craft ladder. These practices persisted despite the absence of formal production guilds in French papermaking and the English industry's freedom from the Statute of Artificers (1563). So the paperworkers' identity, motives, and powers had distinctive sources and forms of expression. They had no place in Laurie's formulation. This article considers the lived experience of making paper by hand, and how the trade's particular features shaped the machine that displaced it. Recent study of how early modern European technology was "learned, operated, and invented" has given rise to a forest of eloquent concepts, including "expertise and experience", "learning by doing", "the mindful hand", and "trading zones"3 (the last two phrases refer less to an actual appendage or physical sites and more to exchanges between natural philosophers and artisans.) Certainly, these terms rest on numerous, 34 Journeymen Paperworkers, the Industrious Revolution, and the