Douglass Morse Howell lived paper. He brought it back to liveliness by investigating its past history and by pushing the limits of its technology. With the hope that the treasure that Howell left behind will not be lost, I would like to see a renewal of interest in his work. While he was alive, Howell's treasure was already somewhat hidden, in the piles of research and letters, the notes and calculations in his office. He bemoaned the lack of a bibliography for papermaking as it related to the fine arts of the past, printing and watercolor especially. This is ironic because his own office seemed like a three-dimensional bibliography. Howell cited his childhood mentor, Guido Biagi, as a major influence on his desire to make paper. Biagi, then director of the Laurentian Library in Florence, guided the young Howell through the museums and libraries of that city, in the 1910s. It was the late 1940s, however, before Howell started making paper. Howell's preliminary research for hand papermaking was conducted at the New York Public Library (which would be the site of a retrospective of his work in 19871). In these early years he communicated with book binders, fine art conservators, and individuals in the commercial pulp and paper industry. He concluded that chlorine gas used to whiten old book papers and works of art, and the chemical cooks of the paper industry were more deleterious to paper than a low pH. He valued his correspondence with Dr. Robert S. Hobbs, Chief of the Paper Section at the National Bureau of Standards, but Howell became increasingly aware that the scientific knowledge of those in the industry was primarily limited to the chemical processing of wood pulps. Though Howell's writings show a particular interest with lime water soaks and retting, as far as I know he never applied these prebeating techniques. I once saw him open a garbage pail of flax which had soaked for many months, but I never saw any paper he made with this fiber. He liked the idea of retting the cut stalks of flax by leaving them in the field to be exposed to the weather. Howell grew his first plot of flax in 1961. He based his preference for bast fibers (such as flax and hemp) over cotton on the structure and nature of the fiber itself. He was fascinated with ancient Chinese hemp papers and his research prompted him to visit Dard Hunter at Hunter's museum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the fifties, shortly before the museum was closed and the collection moved to Appleton, Wisconsin. Many artists working with pulp today are not interested in chemistry or the longevity of their work. Howell felt that it was necessary to understand the process of papermaking at a detailed level, which he used to make high quality papers for others' artwork and to maintain a dialogue with conservators. He loved science and his studio became a laboratory for good reason. Through the years the individuals who were most influential to Howell's research were E. J. LaBarre, of the Paper Publications Society, in Holland; Maurice Perrideau, of the Richard de Bas paper mill, in France; Henry P. Rossiter, from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Gerard Taylor, at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; and Eric Chamberlain of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. In January of 1973 in London, Howell was able to meet with many of the men with whom he had corresponded. He advised Joseph Needham, then working on Science and Civilization in China, on the possibility that the Chinese had made armour from paper. Later Howell titled one of his three dimensional flax forms "Chinese Armour". This breast plate-like piece could probably stop a crossbow bolt. I am convinced that Howell's captivation with early Chinese papermaking and calligraphy had the most impact on his artwork. Laurence Barker, in the catalog for the 1st Biennale of Hand Papermaking in Duren, West Germany (1986), said of Howell: "...Working alone at this beater with nothing more than natural fibers, he introduced to Western papermaking a refinement and sensitivity that can best be described as Oriental." Howell's favorite papers were his scroll works and very thin sheets using beaten linen, which he dried on cloth moulds. "Forming on a cloth mould is the most difficult" he told me. "The pulp has to be greasy [Howell's term for overbeating] enough to be crisp, long fibered enough to add beauty, and yet one doesn't want it to shrink off the mould in drying." He loved texture unhampered by pressing. Drying paper on the mould, whether cloth or metal screen, allowed him to maintain the images he had formed in the vat. The scope of Howell's experimental work with pulp reaches into every area where paper has been used, both as a medium in itself and as support for artistic expression. Though he never made paper bowls, he did make paper lamps, paper hats, and a paper clock face. Howell's earliest art works were woodcut illustrations for Town & Country magazine. In 1946 he established his first studio, at 29 Grand Street in New York City, acquired a Washington hand press, and built his first beater. The first book he printed was The Song of Magdalene, a poem written by Alice Orcutt, then his wife. In the book he used his own multicolored linen papers. Alice Orcutt Howell spoke with me recently about these early years: We were always stony broke. In 1947 we went to Pepperell, Massachusetts, to set up a workshop at Apple Hill Farm--a house full of artists and writers, emotional refugees... The water was so rusty it discolored the paper, so we had to dig snow for the papermaking. Over the years we never had enough money. After I gave him an ultimatum, Douglass supported us by engraving for Cartier. [He] learned to engrave in a couple of weeks, amazingly. We had babies to feed and he was so absorbed in papermaking that he wouldn't get a regular job. So he engraved at home until the wee hours, with the beater running, and made paper whenever he could. His children grew up in a tiny house with walls of peanut butter and a five watt bulb. Howell worked sculpturally, creating high shrinkage flax forms, he printed, he bound books, and he painted with pulp. His earliest pulp paintings, called "Papetries", exhibited in 1955 at Betty Parsons, have not lost the vitality of their color, and may be considered his most beautiful and liberating innovation. In his "Synchronic Drawings" of the sixties, Howell laid string into the water prior to forming a sheet in order to work with what he termed "controlled accident." An influence on the creation of these synchronic drawings was a first study of the Chinese Book of Changes or I Ching...which so interested Carl Jung. Another influence came through the study of Chinese calligraphy and such artists as Sesshu and Mi Fei. Another factor was the mathematics of change.2 In his series called "The Circus", c. 1965, Howell incorporated the controlled accident string inclusions with his studies into watercolor painting. The images suggested by the string line were interpreted, through hand coloring, into various circus themes. Aside from his paperworks, the greatest contribution that Howell gave was his beater design, which allows bast fiber to be processed raw. Many times I saw him load his beater with fibers over twenty inches long. He quipped that beating ramie was "like beating piano wire." These papers almost appear to glow from within. So far, I have not been able to beat hemp (Cannabis sativa) to translucency and obtain the stretch that Howell could achieve in his hemp papers. It is not easy to overbeat raw flax or hemp without getting a brittle result. Some day I hope to follow his logs for beating hemp, to see if I can duplicate his results. During the seventies and eighties, Howell concentrated on teaching, flax sculpture, and book binding. He hoped to write a book, but felt that he needed two secretaries. He had already written reams about papermaking--such as small articles about "The Operation of the Beater," "The Problems of Testing Papers for Permanence at the Fine Arts Level," "The use of the Mallet"--, his writing simply needed to be organized and edited. He claimed that it was necessary first to do sophisticated laboratory tests in order to back up his assertions. Though this would have been valuable, it seems a shame that he did not put his writings together anyway. "Entering Howell's storage room is like being let loose in a treasure chamber, as package after package is opened and papers are placed in your hands to touch and appreciate. The range of paper begins to defy the definition of paper itself", wrote John Brzostoski in the February/March 1981 issue of Craft Magazine. That same year the Friends of the Dard Hunter Paper Museum was founded, out of concern that Hunter's life work might not be maintained and cherished. A new generation of hand papermakers, binders, and conservators took it upon themselves to renew the interest and protect the collection that Hunter had sold to the Institute of Paper Chemistry3 in 1954. Like Hunter before him, in the last years of his life Howell feared that his efforts might be ignored. It is not clear why he worried, as he had continued to be exhibited until his death, and received inquiries from all over the world. He had shut down his studio in 1984, so perhaps his concern stemmed from the frustration of retirement. It must have been difficult to stop making paper after thirty-five years of daily activity. In 1993 Howell received a gold medal at the 50th Anniversary Celebration of the American Craft Council. At the ceremonies in Chicago, two of his four children, Beth King and Timothy Howell, accepted the medal for their father because his health was failing. All four of his children managed to be with him just before he died. His daughter Beth has told me many wonderful memories of being the child of a one man papermill and recently said: "We intend to see that his work will be available and are anxious that it be appreciated." That, of course, is up to us.   Notes 1. An earlier retrospective exhibit of his work was held at the American Craft Museum, in 1982. 2. "Poet in Pulp and Rag," Artists Proof, #6, (Fall/Winter 1964). 3. Now the Institute of Paper Science and Technology, in Atlanta, Georgia. His collection is now a part of the American Museum of Papermaking.