The Paper Chase Is Wally Dawes’ Very Personal Passion
His real name is Wally Dawes, but his customers call him Mr. Paper. It is an appropriate nickname.
Consider the following. On a recent trip to Italy, Dawes had only a short time. Did he spend it in Rome? Venice? Florence? No. “I had heard there was an old man down in Sicily who made papyrus (a predecessor to paper),” Dawes said. “I didn’t know any more than that, but I found him.”
And how about when he visited Japan? “I went to a small village where I knew they made paper. I heard the sound of fibers being beaten (a process used in paper making), and I headed for it. They didn’t want to let me in, but I insisted.”
In England? “There’s a mill in Maidstone, Kent, where the water is so pure they make mostly laboratory papers. They have a corner on that market because their papers are so pure.”
“He doesn’t go anywhere that doesn’t have something to do with paper,” Dawes’ wife, RoseMarie, said.
Dawes is a paper merchant. The store he and his wife run, the Paper Source in downtown Los Angeles, carries the finest papers from around the world, and many of the West Coast’s best-known artists have come to rely on the Paper Source for their watercolor and printmaking papers. But for Dawes, the real pleasure comes in knowing about paper, not in selling it.
Two years ago, he decided to share his knowledge and made room for a paper museum at the Paper Source. The museum, which Dawes opens for school tours and other events, catalogues the development of paper from its predecessors, like pre-Colombian amatl and the Egyptian papyrus, to modern papers.
The museum also contains diagrams and information about how paper is made. First, cellulose fibers, commonly from trees, flax, bast or cotton, are beaten; next they are mixed with water; and finally the mixture is spread on a screen to dry.
An Adventure Saga
When Dawes tells it, the history of paper sounds like an adventure saga. He talks about how the ability to make paper was first developed in China during the Han Dynasty around AD 105. The secret was closely guarded by the Chinese until early in the 8th Century when craftsmen in Japan learned the technique. In 751 A.D., troops of Genghis Khan fighting near Afghanistan were captured by Muslim soldiers. Two of the Eastern prisoners knew the secret of paper, and taught their captors, bringing paper technology to the West for the first time.
Dawes’ museum also catalogues the more recent history of paper, including such things as the decline of rag paper. In earlier eras, when rags were made of cotton and not synthetic fibers, paper mills bought large quantities of cotton rags with which they made their finest papers. The supply was then abundant. A poster in the paper museum tells it: “Rags make paper. Paper makes money. Money makes banks. Banks make loans. Loans make beggars. Beggars make rags.”
But as synthetics became popular, the rag paper industry came to a standstill. Now only a few mills still make paper from cotton, and they must buy their “rags” directly from the cotton mills at much greater cost.
Dawes’ museum and store also contain examples of the finest papers made today. He carries, for example, a handmade paper containing real wildflowers made at the Richard De Bas mill in France (at $6.14 a sheet). He carries gold leaf paper (at $56 a sheet) and silver leaf paper at $45 a sheet. He carries the kind of Japanese rice paper (Inomachi) on which Chagall did his lithographs (at $9 a sheet).
Many of Dawes’ customers are artists searching for just the right papers for particular projects. And Dawes is constantly on the lookout for new papers for his artist clients. One day recently he was excited about a new handmade paper he had just gotten in from a mill in Spain. The mill had spent more than a year training four vat men to make a 78x78-inch watercolor paper. “It is the largest handmade paper in the world,” Dawes said. “It is tremendously difficult for four men to coordinate the single, scooping action it takes to get the pulp evenly on the screen.” But Dawes believes the mill’s trouble was worthwhile. “The paper is so beautiful that each sheet should be framed as a work of art,” he said.
On occasion, Dawes has been unable to supply artists with just the papers they want, and so has designed new papers himself to meet their needs. Once, for example, while at a convention in Las Vegas, Dawes heard about a nearby artist, Roy Purcell, who owned the largest etching press in the world. “I had to see that,” Dawes said.
When Dawes got to Henderson, Nev., where the artist lived, he found Purcell had a serious problem. “He had built the press to produce 12-foot murals, but there was no paper in the world big enough for his press,” Dawes recalled.
“I designed a heavy etching paper and had it made at a mill in Massachusetts. It took me a while to get up my courage, because you can’t try a small sample,” Dawes said. One press run of the new paper costs approximately $10,000.
‘Feedback From Artists’
Most recently, he created an artists’ paper called Westwinds which he says has proved to be particularly good for serigraphs. “The most valuable things I’ve learned about papers, I haven’t gotten from books but in feedback from artists,” Dawes said. “In the end, the only people who can make a final judgment about a paper is the people who use it.”
Not all of Dawes work with paper involves artists. Much of the work he considers most important involves the preservation of paper and paper products. “The glamorous side of what I do involves papers for creating art,” Dawes said. “But the unglamorous side--the care and preservation of art and artifacts--is just as important.”
Dawes’ work as an archivist has included such things as assisting the Cecil B. DeMille estate in preserving DeMille’s papers, and helping a large religious organization to preserve its documents by providing extremely high quality paper and storage boxes treated with fungicides. “People just don’t realize that if paper is properly cared for, it is more permanent than marble statues,” Dawes said.
Dawes was not born to the paper trade. Raised in New England, Dawes was uncertain what career he would pursue. Then, during World War II, he enlisted in the Navy where he worked as a navigator. “When I got out of the Navy, I returned to New England, but I’d been corrupted. I’d seen too much of the world.” After another stint in the Navy, Dawes decided he’d had enough. “When I finally got out, I wanted something as far away from ships as possible,” Dawes said. So when friends offered to let him buy into their paper business, Dawes accepted.
A Rare Vacation
Dawes’ firm was based in New York, where, he said, “We supplied most of Wall Street with rag papers.” For years, Dawes couldn’t envision living and working anywhere but New York, but then he visited Santa Barbara on a rare vacation and fell in love with California. “Up to then I thought New York was the center of the universe,” Dawes recalled. “I didn’t know anything like this existed. I asked my wife if she’d like to move here, and she said yes.”
That was 14 years ago, and Dawes has no regrets about the move. He is doing what he loves, and his business is thriving. And the way Dawes views it, he is working in one of the world’s most important fields. “We could have a power outage and the world would continue to function,” Dawes reflected recently. “But if something were to happen to paper. . . .”
