[he author submitted this article to us for consideration in 1988, a year before she died. We decided not to use it then and it has sat patiently in our files ever since. We are pleased to publish it now.]
John Mason was the son of John H. (J. H.) Mason, R.D.I. (1875-1951), who made a distinguished career for himself as a printer. He was the compositor for the Doves Press from 1900-1909 and also assisted Count Kessler in setting up the Cranach Press in Weimar, Germany, in 1913. Kessler also hired J. H. Mason to supervise the superb Cranach Hamlet, which Gordon Craig illustrated. Mason also printed his own edition of Cupid and Psyche, in Latin with his own English translations. While working at the Doves Press, J. H. Mason brought home some proof sheets on handmade paper. John Mason was immediately struck by the beauty of the paper, it “appeared to me to have God’s own blessing. Its smell carried me away to other times and places.”1 As a young child, Mason had a weakness for the sensuousness of honest, simple, handmade materials and resolved some day he would “make stuff like this.”2 He was not to return to this dream until almost forty years later, in 1954. In the intervening time, Mason, like his father, found his place in the world of book making. During the twenties, he helped found the Gregynog Press in Wales and later managed the Shakespeare Head Press, in Stratford-on-Avon. Mason became very well known for his bookbindings and he taught this craft at the Leicester College of Arts and Crafts from 1930 until his retirement in 1960. In the summer of 1954, when he was 53 years old, Mason finally tried his hand at making paper. He was tidying up his garden by shearing off the leaves of a large bed of montbretia and thought, “why not try making paper from this?” His wife was away so he decided not to waste the opportunity. So I dashed down to the oil shop and bought caustic soda and boiled up the leaves in a preserving pan. I washed and strained the boiled fibre and by evening had a bath of wonderful raw material. Most of that night I worked furiously passing the wet fibrous mass through a mincing machine. Then I started to clean up the kitchen. Alack-a-day! The caustic soda had boiled over and ruined the enamel of the gas stove, roughened the sauce pans and bleached patches in the lino on the floor. Disaster, there was no forgiveness for me. I had to replace and renew everything that I had spoiled. This made my fibre the more precious; I just had to go on. I borrowed a large pestle and mortar from a chemist and, taking no heed of passing time, in Chinese fashion, pounded down my fibre to pulp. I made a rough mould and deckle, couched my first montbretia sheets and sun dried them in the garden. Tub sized and pressed they were paper, wonderful sheets of paper.3 Mason quickly outgrew his kitchen mill. His wife, upon her return, told him that he must choose between a happy marriage with a clean kitchen or a wretched, lonely existence in his papermaking kitchen. So he set up his Twelve by Eight Mill on the second floor of the college. With help and equipment from Barcham Green, Amies, Tuckenhay, and Wookey Hole, he soon had a mill that he and his students could experiment in. And experiment they did! With the enthusiasm of a much younger man, Mason pulped plants, weeds, curtains, and even his own shirt to make paper. He was creative and somewhat unorthodox in his methods and equipment, devoted to a craft he saw as threatened but “far too lovely to be allowed to die.”4 One wonders what would have happened if the garden had not needed cleaning or if Mason’s wife had been at home. Would he have made his wonderful, almost ebullient papers? Fortunately for the craft, everything was perfect for Mason’s initiation into the marvels and satisfactions of making paper by hand. Earlier in his career when writing about book binding, Mason wrote: Man by instinct desires to make things and in doing so enjoys the deepest satisfactions life can give. Sport brings health, confidence and poise, gardening philosophy, but to have made beautiful things is to have lived.5 I believe that this statement applies equally well to his attitude about papermaking and echoes what many others have discovered about the wonders of making something by hand.
Endnotes 1. John Mason, Papermaking, (Orpheus Press, Leicester, 1959), p. 2.2. Ibid, p. 3.3. Ibid, pp. 4-5.4. John Mason, Twelve by Eight: Some Adventures in Papermaking (a talk to the Double Crown Club), Leicester College of Arts and Crafts, 1958, p. 4.5. John Mason, Bookbinding, (Frederick Warne and Co., London, 1936), p. vii.