The term half stuff comes from the fact that these rags are only processed halfway. Traditionally, after rags were gathered, cut, and cooked, they were processed in two different types of Hollander beaters. First they were run through a breaker. This Hollander-like machine had a roll and bedplate with fewer and sharper blades so that it would cut and break up the fiber without causing too much hydration or fibrillation. The resulting "half stuff" would then be transferred into a refining beater where it would be further beaten to the requirements of the paper being made. As the process of papermaking industrialized some mills began to specialize in the production of pulp rather than paper. I have used half stuff for papermaking ever since I built my first Hollander beater in the 1970s. At that time there was only one source for half stuff: the Cheney Pulp and Paper Company (pronounced "Cheeney") in Franklin, Ohio. They sold it in 400-pound bales of damp-pressed, garbled-up rag. When you bought a bale you paid a lot of money to ship water that would soon evaporate out of it. Today their half stuff comes in dry lap form, so it is much ON Cheney Pulp and Paper Company: easier to ship and store. I had always wondered what the Cheney pulp mill was like, and why they had changed their product. Last year, while traveling around the country as "wandering book artists," my wife Donna and I visited the mill. Franklin is a city of about 12,000, in the Great Miami River Valley of southwestern Ohio. The town was named for Benjamin Franklin, and did its namesake proud during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when paper manufacturing and printing were the major industries of the region. The river provided the power and the Erie Canal transported the product to market. In 1924, Howard Cheney, an employee of the Srere Brothers Pulp Mill, purchased the mill and renamed it Cheney Pulp and Paper. The company had many setbacks, including floods and a boiler explosion in 1934 that killed seven employees and destroyed the mill. The mill was rebuilt and continues today as a family-run business, with third- and fourth-generation family members currently operating the day-to-day production of the mill. As we neared the mill we could hear machinery running. The rags arrive in giant bales that are broken open and sorted for plastic and other "pernicious contraries" as British papermakers call the shoes, buttons, and other junk mixed in with the baled rag. In the 1970s Cheney's raw materials came mostly from garment factories on the East Coast. At that time they produced two standard grades, a dull white made from muslin and bright white made from bleached denim. After the NAFTA agreement of the 90s those sources dried up and Cheney began to use raw cotton or thread waste for the dull-white pulp. At the same time fashions changed and denim started being made with spandex in it. This rendered it unusable for papermaking and as an alternative Cheney started using cotton knits—rejected t-shirts from garment factories in the Caribbean—for their bleached, bright white pulp. The whole operation is very nineteenth century, Rube Goldberg- esque, with gangly, giant machinery everywhere. Starting upstairs, the rags are run through a shredder, a terribly dusty operation, which is done under black light so workers can find and remove stray fluorescent fibers. The shredded fiber is pushed through a hole in the floor into a boiler, where it is cooked with caustic soda. From the boiler it is dumped into a cylindrical pit that has refiner blades at the bottom. Then a slowly rotating auger moves it through a bleaching tube. Next it passes through more refiners, each further reducing the fiber length. Finally it is put through a centrifuge to remove plastic, and over magnetic traps to remove metal. When Cheney used breakers, it drained, pressed, baled, and shipped the half stuff damp. Now that Cheney uses refiners, it runs the half stuff through a simple papermaking machine to produce dry lap. This has allowed Cheney to ship internationally and today it runs its machines 24/7, making pulp for many of the world's currency mills. It is amazing that such a tiny factory creates such a large share of the world's production of rag pulp. What is even more amazing is that this same pulp, used by wealthy papermaking corporations around the world to make money, is also available to a hand papermaking "beggar" like me.
