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In the history of information technologies, Gutenberg and his printing press are (understandably) treated with the kind of reverence even the most celebrated of modern tech tycoons could only imagine. So perhaps it will come as a surprise that Europe’s literacy rates remained fairly stagnant for centuries after printing presses, originally invented in about 1440, started popping up in major cities across the continent. Progress was inconsistent and unreliable, with����booming through the 16th��century and then stagnating, even declining, across most of Western Europe. Great Britain, France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy all����in 1651–1700 than in 1701–1750.

Then came the early 19th��century, which saw��and. These changes both contributed to and resulted from major societal changes, such as the��. There were more books than ever and more people who could read them. For some, this looked less like progress and more like a dangerous and destabilizing trend that could threaten not just literature, but the solvency of civilization itself.

The real����by more than 60 percent between 1460 and 1500: A book composed of����in Austria—a����at the time—but by the 1470s, a 500-folio book would fetch something in the��. There were even books on the market that sold for as little as 2 or 3 florins. In 1498, a Bible composed of over��. Costs continued to decline, albeit at a much slower rate, over the next three centuries. As a result, books were no longer reserved only for the clergy or for kings: Owning a printed Bible or book of hours became a����for the emerging class of moderately wealthy merchants and magnates.

Books remained, however, far outside the range of the common man or woman, until the price plummeted once again in the 19th��century. No longer was literacy necessarily a signifier of wealth, class, and status. This abrupt change created a moral panic as members of the traditional reading classes argued over who had the right to information—and what kind of information ought to be available at all.

The shift happened thanks to major developments in both printing and paper technology. The����between 1455, when Gutenberg printed his famous Bible, and 1800: The letters had to be hand-placed in a matrix, coated with a special ink that transferred more cleanly from tile to page—another of Gutenberg’s inventions—and pressed one-by-one onto the pages. The first major change to this tried-and-tested design came with Friedrich Koenig’s mechanized press in 1812, which could make��, compared to the����allegedly accomplished by printers in Frankfurt, Germany, in the second half of the 16thcentury. In 1844, American inventor Richard March Hoe first deployed his��, which could print 8,000 pages in a single hour.

Naturally, faster prints drove up demand for paper, and soon traditional methods of paper production couldn’t keep up. The paper machine,��in 1799 at the Didot family’s paper mill, could make��as the traditional method, which involved pounding rags into pulp by hand using a mortar and pestle. By 1825, 50 percent of England’s paper supply was produced by machines. As the stock of rags for papermaking grew smaller and smaller, papermakers began experimenting with other materials such as. In 1800, the Marquess of Salisbury gifted to King George III a book printed on “the first useful Paper manufactured solely from Straw” to, which were already in “extraordinary scarcity” in Europe. In 1831, a member of the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India tried to“ought to be generally substituted for the flimsy friable” English paper “to which we commit all our records.”

By the 1860s, there was a decent alternative: wood-pulp paper. Today, wood-pulp paper accounts for����(with an additional 55 percent from recycled wood pulp), but when it was introduced, the prospect of a respectable publication using wood-pulp paper was practically unthinkable—hence��pulp fiction, the early 19th-century literary snob’s preferred way to insult a work as simultaneously nondescript and sensational.

The problem with wood-pulp paper was its, which made it liable to slow dissolution over decades. It couldn’t be used for a fine-looking book that could be passed through a family as an heirloom: It neither looked the part, nor could it survive the generations.

Traditional rag paper, on the other hand, was smooth, easy to write on, foldable, and could be��. Paper made from nontraditional materials, especially wood pulp, was��. (Paper from straw, which enjoyed brief popularity in 1829 thanks to the chance invention of a Pennsylvania farmer, is durable,. One newspaper was so.)

Wood pulp or straw, the cheap paper used in mass-market books sold at extremely low prices. There were a few different kinds of these books, all with descriptive (and usually pejorative) names: the penny dreadfuls (gothic-inspired tales sold for a penny each), pulp magazines (named after the wood-pulp paper of which they were composed), yellowbacks (cheap books bound using yellow strawboard, which is then covered with a paper slip in yellow glaze), and others. The cheapness that had made them so unsuitable for fine books and government records made them excellent fodder for experimental, unusual, and controversial literary developments.

Detractors delighted in linking����with the “volatile minds” of pulp readers. Londoner W. Coldwell wrote a three-part diatribe, “On Reading,” lamenting that����Samuel Taylor Coleridge����how books, once revered as “religious oracles … degaded into culprits” as they became more widely available.

By the end of the century there was growing concern—especially among middle class parents—that these cheap, plentiful books were��into a life of��and violence. The books were even blamed for a handful of murders and��by young boys. Perpetrators of crimes whose misdoings were linked to their fondness for penny dreadfuls were often��of the books. In the United States, “dime novels” () were given the same treatment. Newspapers reported that Jesse Pomeroy, a teenage serial killer who targeted other children, was “, until,” as was argued in his trial, “his brain was turned, and his highest ambition” was to emulate the violent dime novel character “Texas Jack.” Moralizers painted the books as no better than “,” with headlines warning readers that Pomeroy’s brutality was “.” Others hoped that by providing alternatives—penny delightfuls or “”—they could curb the demand for the sensational literature.��from the late 1820s tells young people to stop reading novels and read books of substance: “[F]ar better were it for a person to confine himself to the plain sober facts recorded in history and the lives of eminent individuals, than to wander through the flowery pages of fiction.”

These books represent the beginnings of modern mass media. At the confluence of increasing literacy rates and ever-growing urban populations looking for recreation, cheap imprints flourished. But it wasn’t just social change driving the book boom: It was technological change as well. In 1884, Simon Newton Dexter North, who would later become superintendent of the Census Bureau,wrote in his����of the 10th��census that the “chief cause” for the “reduction in the price” of paper “is the successful use…of wood pulp.”

For a material meant to be transient, wood-pulp paper has left its mark and the world. Forests have shrunk while literacy rates have soared, and today the��. We are living in the ironic epilogue to a triumph of a hard-won Victorian-era innovation. Wood pulp paper took on a life of its own as soon as it hit the presses, and it demonstrates to a modern audience the crucial lesson that the impact of a technology goes beyond what it does: what it is made of, who uses it, who��doesn’t��use it, and what it represents to the people who buy it.

This article originally appeared in��, a collaboration among��,��, and��. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more,����and sign��.