Founded in Manhattan in 1901 by Richard Tracy Stevens, the JPC began by importing thin Tosa tissue from Kochi, Japan, for use in tea bags and for Elizabeth Arden cosmetics. Soon the JPC was importing paper, much of it handmade, from fifteen countries and distributing sheets from regional offices in Philadelphia (starting c. 1915) , Boston (1916), Chicago (1924), Cleveland (1924), and Dallas, which also represented the Pacific region (c. 1930). In 1915, the Japan Paper Company moved from 34 Union Square to its new building at 109 East 31st St. (It stayed there until its merger with Whitehead and Alliger in 1957 made the space inadequate.) Over the years that building housed the operations of the company and through its doors passed some of the legends of the paper trade. Initially, the bottom floor and first floors were dedicated to storage and shipping of stock. The second and third floors were offices, and housed George Nelson, the art paper manager since 1913, and salesmen, including Herb Farrier, Hayward Beatty, Thomas Fairbanks, Melvin Loos, Court Miller and, eventually, the much loved Jack Robinson.3 The fourth floor also held stock, and the fifth floor was the printing shop of Gerhard Gerlach. Vice President Harrison Elliot presided over the sixth floor, close to the company board room.4 In 1938, the company changed its name to the Stevens-Nelson Company, in deference to both Nelson's growing importance to the company, and the anti-Japanese feeling in the United States. In 1957, it became Nelson-Whitehead, and in 1962, the Andrews/Nelson/Whitehead Company, as it merged with and acquired other paper dealers. The Japan Paper Company is still remembered because the people who worked there loved both paper and fine printing. The company's history is documented by hundreds of beautifully designed and printed advertising broadsides, pamphlets, and sample booklets featuring their paper line. These were so compelling that users stashed away examples as collectibles. Today there are caches of these sheets in the print rooms of the Boston Public Library and The New York Public Library, and in the rare book collections of the Library of Congress—all gifts of notable paper lovers Herbert Farrier, the first manager of the Boston Office of JPC; Leonard Schlosser, the president of Lindenmeyr Paper Company; and Harrison Elliott, a papermaking companion to Dard Hunter. The apex of their printed sample books, Specimens—the grandest sample book of them all—was published in 1953 and now graces the shelves of many libraries, both public and private.  Among the early JPC publications was Richard Tracy Stevens's account of a ten-week papermaking tour of Japan he took in 1905. Part information, part promotion, five hundred copies of The Art of Paper Making in Japan were privately printed, on the very paper it described (which the Japan Paper Company imported in several weights). Stevens recounted observing gampi vellum being made at the Imperial Mill in Oji, near Tokyo, and at the newer commercial mill at Shidzuoka. He also described his visit to traditional papermaking villages in Kochi and in northwestern Japan. Free from the overt racism found in some contemporaneous travel accounts of Japan, Stevens noted with pleasure the skill of the papermaking men and women and, with some concern, their low wages. The big factory mills at Oji and Shidzuoka used modern technology as much as possible to increase production of the vellum sheets that were much in demand around the world. Mitsumata fiber was purchased from farmers and transported in carts to the mill, where it was macerated and washed by hand. The bark was picked off by hand, the fiber then bleached in large iron cauldrons and washed in man-made pools of running water. The fiber was beaten in a row of Hollander beaters, then cast by hand into sheets in a modified factory system that used rank upon rank of vats extending across a huge mill floor, each manned by a papermaker . The sheets were dried and polished indoors against metal tanks heated by piped steam. They were then wrapped and trimmed by hand for market. From about 1875, sheets of Japanese gampi vellum found their way to American and European cities where they were used for fine art and fine printing.  The JPC advertising campaign of 1907 highlighted hand-papermaking in China and Europe with individual folded paper samples. After 1910, the JPC began to showcase its fine printing and art papers by issuing more elaborately printed advertising folios of each sheet as it was added to the line, or as new ideas for advertising came up. These sample sheets incorporated two- and four-color printing with images or decorative designs and borders. Text on the folios typically described the sheet. The individual folios were gathered in a portfolio folder of handsome gray Japanese paper–covered boards with a vellum spine, bearing a Japan Paper Company label. The portfolios extant today are numbered on typed labels found inside the cover, and carry folios printed within a period of a few years. Apparently, the gray folders were kept separately from the sample sheets, and groups of papers were made up with current folios as needed for presentation. The folios display printing on two of the four surfaces, so the buyer of paper could see printing, bleed through and blank paper in each sample. Some folios have indications of the press and designer of the folio; all bear a numerical code on the back that runs chronologically, perhaps to indicate the printing job number. 5  Tuscany, a handmade sheet from Fabriano Mills in Italy, made expressly for the JPC, was the subject for the two types of folios put out by the company during the early 1920s. A larger sheet, prominently displaying the name of the paper, was included in the large Hand Made Papers portfolios. A smaller sample of Tuscany, labeled "Good Paper speaks for itself," was folded in four and shows the effect of images printed on the paper. The colophon reports that this sheet was printed in August of 1922, in Garamond 12 pt. and Goudy open 18 pt. type. It was probably sent out separately to paper users who did not quite rate the large portfolio format samples.  Lombardia Covers, another Fabriano paper, were important enough to get their own paper sample booklet in 1925. This booklet showed printing by photographic reproduction, heavy embossing, and one- and two-color lithography. Each of the printing types was made on a quarter-sheet sample of the highly colored papers; the sheets were available in cream, deep red-orange, yellow-orange, blue, cerise, and lavender. In 1953, George Nelson, by then president of the company, embarked on a sample book project that has never been equaled. He published five thousand copies of Specimens, the non-plus ultra of sample books, displaying samples from Belgium, England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and Switzerland. The acknowledgments thank "more than 150 designers, printers and papermakers from ten countries." Specimens was designed by Eugene Ettenberg, printed in letterpress by the Gallery Press of New York, and quarter-bound in leather with various decorative paper covers by Russell-Rutter Company. Presented to paper company executives, papermakers, pressmen, fine press libraries, and directors of museums, the book contains 109 sample sheets, each demonstrating the paper's use in fine printing. Vera Freeman, who began working at Stevens-Nelson as Mr. Nelson's assistant in 1955, remembers well the comments about the huge expense incurred in making Specimens and off-hand remarks that another successful book like that would ruin the company!  Perhaps it was a renewed sense of fiscal responsibility that made single-sheet samples the rule through the 1950s and 1960s at Stevens-Nelson, Nelson Whitehead, and Andrews/Nelson/Whitehead (A/N/W). During the 1970s, modest booklets of various types of paper were produced annually by the fine paper group, of which Vera Freeman was then vice-president.6 These bore simple descriptive titles like Oriental papers, European Printing Papers, or Papers for Conservation, and did not vary much from year to year. However, taken together, the small booklets chart the expansion of the fine printmaking papers stocked by A/N/W.    In 1964, June Wayne, the founder and director of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop, complained to Vera Freeman that she could not buy in the United States many of the finest printmaking papers she had found in Europe. Mrs. Freeman corrected that. The range of printmaking papers offered by A/N/W grew steadily through the 1960s and 1970s, as the fine paper division negotiated with the principals of the fine print renaissance and the owners of mills with whom they had a long relationship. Together, the makers, sellers, and users of paper developed new products including mouldmade printing paper in rolls, for Ken Tyler of Gemini GEL; mouldmade papers in thirty colors; and high quality archival printing papers.7 Some of these could also be used in the conservation of historic or artistic materials (A/N/W donated papers for the repair of books damaged by the floods in Florence). Other products were specifically marketed for conservation, including the first colored archival-quality matboard, introduced in 1976. In 1982, Mrs. Freeman compiled the information available on the scores of papers imported for the fine arts, and issued the information as the A/N/W Paper Catalog. In 1986, A/N/W issued its last great samplebook--Imported Handmade Papers from Andrews/Nelson/Whitehead. Using paper donated by the makers, and in honor of Vera Freeman's impending retirement, Henry Morris designed Handmade Papers and printed 1000 copies at the Bird and Bull Press. Papers made by Barcham Green, Richard de Bas, Fabriano, Larroque, and St. Armand, and papers imported from Japan through the Moriki group are all represented. The press work commissioned by the Japan Paper Company (and its later incarnations) is a fitting legacy for that fine firm. The broadsides demonstrate that the papermen and women who built the company took obvious delight in participating in the making and use of their products. They brought together the sheets of paper that inspired the hand-papermaking renaissance in America, and ensured the continued manufacture of handmade paper. The sheets they presented to the American market continue to inspire papermakers today.   Acknowledgments I am indebted to many people who shared their enthusiasm and respect for the Japan Paper Company with me over the last ten years or so. The list includes Sinclair Hitchings at the Boston Public Library, Roy Perkinson at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Holly Kreuger and Andrew Robb at the Library of Congress.  David Aldera, Vera Freeman, Mark Gottsegen, Aimée Kligman, Murray Lebwohl, Steve Steinberg, Yoonjoo and George Strumfels, and Marcia Widenor have all contributed information or material on the company to the National Gallery of Art Paper Sample Collection. I am grateful to them all.  I am also much indebted to Lehua Fisher, technician in the National Gallery Paper Lab for her help in coordinating the photography for this article.  Notes 1. After a hundred years of mergers and morphs, the JPC is now doing business as Andrews/ Nelson/ Whitehead - Crestwood, a Division of the Willmann Paper Company.  2. See Vera Freeman's letter to the editor, Fine Print, Vol.2 No. 3, July 1976, p. 45-47. 3. During the 1970s, Jack Robinson started an archive of the Japan Paper Company that has since disappeared. All those who value the history of this marvelous Company would love to know what happened to the material Robinson was able to gather. 4. I thank Sinclair Hitchings, who kindly gave me this information. John Krill published an important essay on "Harrison G. Elliott, Creator of Handmade Papers" (The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, Volume 35, Number 1, January 1978). 5. Some duplicate sample sheets are found with different numbers on the reverse suggesting a later "edition" of the advertising was printed when necessary. By comparing the numbers on the reverse with a chronology of the JPC, pieced together from published advertising and printed material, I have been able to date most of the JPC broadsides in the National Gallery's Paper Sample Collection (see sidebar).  6. Vera Freeman wrote on "Aspects of Importing" in Hand Papermaking, Winter, 1996, p. 24-25. 7. "Lady of Paper" Art Material Trade News Vol XXXIII, No. 6 June 1981, p. 46-48.