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Sam just came back from seeing the British Museum traveling exhibit on the Egyptians at the Art & Science Museum here in Singapore, so we were discussing mummies.

I told him my father told me that Maine paper mills used to use old cotton mummy wrappings to make paper.  

Luckily Wikipedia was able to provide some confirmation….

“Dard Hunter is a well-known paper researcher and cataloguer and a proponent of handmade paper. His book, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft, relates the experiments of I. Augustus Stanwood in both ground-wood paper and mummy paper. Hunter received his information from Stanwood’s son Daniel, a professor of international law. According to Daniel, during the American Civil War his father was hard-pressed for materials for his Maine mill. As such, he imported mummies from Egypt, stripped the bodies of their wrappings and used this material for making paper. Several shiploads of mummies were brought to the mill in Gardiner, Maine and were thus used to make a brown wrapping paper for grocers, butchers and other merchants. Professor Stanwood continues on to report that the rags supposedly caused a cholera outbreak among the workers since there were no standards for disinfection at this time. However, since cholera is actually a bacterium, it is unlikely that active disease cells could have survived for centuries in the wrappings, meaning the outbreak at the plant was likely either from poor personal hygiene of the workers or from dirty rags recently imported from deceased Europeans, primarily Frenchmen and Italians, rather than the mummy rags.[12]”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_paper

The following is about my friend Julia’s father….

It’s an excerpt from The New Statesman as it celebrates its centenary as a publication:

One person who is still with us is Norman Mackenzie, who joined the NS as assistant editor in 1943 after being recommended to the editor Kingsley Martin by Harold Laski of the LSE. Norman, who is 91, had been forced to leave the RAF because of ill health and, as he writes on page 104, his interview took place at Martin’s cottage in the north Essex village of Little Easton, near Dunmow. It went well. Norman remained on the paper until 1962, when the then editor, John Freeman, called him the “rock on which the best of the NS has been founded”. He went on to have a distinguished career as an academic at Sussex University, where he founded, with others, the Open University and wrote many books. His political journey took him from the Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party to Labour and then the Social Democratic Party.

Last year, Norman was given only two months to live and yet, although in poor health, he remains resilient and lucid. I met him for the first time last autumn when the historian Hugh Purcell and I visited him at the home he shares with his wife, Gillian, in Lewes, Sussex. I returned to see him again in February, only to find that he’d broken his hip in a fall and was confined to bed.

Although it was late morning we opened a bottle of champagne and sat beside Norman as he talked without sentimentality and with great wit and epigrammatic flair about his days on the NS – about Martin (“He was the epitome of his readers, instinctively understood them and was never a bore”), George Orwell (“He was a difficult man; no one was close to George”), J B Priestley, the cartoonist Vicky, C H Rolph, Asa Briggs (“The only man I know who was ever a snob about himself”), Richard Crossman (“He was an awful New Statesman editor, the sort of man who would review his own books”), Arthur Koestler (“a clever shit”) and others.

“Here’s to the next 50 years,” he said, raising his glass and looking at me. “You might even make it.”

Asked by Hugh if he knew the spy George Blake, Norman said: “One does have standards, my dear.” Of Dorothy Woodman, Martin’s partner, he said: “There was some­thing not quite right with her. I got on with her badly very well, if you see what I mean.”

Norman stopped reading the NS when it became preoccupied with what he called the “silly left”. He started reading it again last year. “It’s like coming back to the place after 30 years away to find someone has been polishing the doorknobs.” It’s wonderful to have the chance to publish him in this issue.

As I left Norman’s house at the end of that first visit, he accompanied me to the door. “It’s terrible being 90,” he said. I knew that his wife was religious and I asked if he, too, was a believer. “No, it’s a load of nonsense,” he said. “But I’m not afraid. I just hope there isn’t too much pain at the end.” We shook hands and I left him there, a tall, slightly stooped figure, standing in the doorway as he peered out at the rain, his arm raised in a formal gesture of farewell.

Norman is approaching the end of his life and is a last, cherished link to the old world of Kingsley Martin’s New Statesman and Orwell’s London. When he’s gone, there will be no one left to recall what it was like to work at the Great Turnstile offices during the Second World War, when the NS became a dominant publication in the culture, capturing the mood and articulating the hopes and aspirations of a generation.