Before a book was a book, it was almost certainly a tree. I mean that literally, physically, in the most straightforward sense possible. The pages you hold, the cover you run your fingers across, and the paper that has been slowly doing what paper does since the day it was made, all of it was in all likelihood once part of something standing in a forest, drinking water through its roots, adding a ring to its trunk every year, existing in the world with a complete indifference to the story that would eventually be printed on it. The tree did not know it was going to become a book. It was busy being a tree.
And here is the thing about trees that we tend to forget when we are holding the thing they became: they take a long time to grow. A softwood pine, the kind most commonly used in contemporary paper production, can take between twenty-five and thirty years to reach harvestable size, depending on species and climate. The trees used in older books, before the industry moved to plantation timber and before the Fourdrinier machine industrialised papermaking in the early nineteenth century and changed the relationship between forest and page permanently, were often old in ways that are difficult to sit with now. Old enough to have lived through things like wars, droughts and natural disasters.
Dendrochronology (the science of reading tree rings) can tell you with remarkable precision what a tree lived through. A narrow ring means drought. A wide one means a good year. You can see fire scars. Flood years. The entire environmental biography of a tree, written in wood, one year at a time, for as long as it stood.
A book, in a sense, is a different kind of record: the biography of a human mind, written in language, one page at a time. What is less often noted is that these two records were, for a period, occupying the same physical object. The tree's biography became the surface on which the human one was written.
The book in your hands, if it is old enough, was made from something that was alive before you were born. Possibly before your parents were born. Possibly before anyone you have ever met drew their first breath.
That history does not disappear when the tree becomes pulp and the pulp becomes paper and the paper becomes a page. It becomes invisible. Which is not the same thing.
Literature keeps returning to trees with a persistence that goes beyond coincidence. The tree in Genesis is the place where knowledge lives, the thing you are warned away from and cannot help approaching. Birnam Wood in Macbeth does not move because Shakespeare needed a plot device; it moves because the natural world has been watching, and it has finally decided to act. The baobabs in The Little Prince are not a gardening problem, they are the thing that grows in you when you are not paying attention, the roots that take hold before you notice them, the danger that is also, somehow, beautiful.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote that on paper. Paper that was once a tree. The baobabs grew in the wood before they grew in the story.
There is a school of thought in literary criticism, ecocriticism, which concerns itself with the relationship between literature and the natural world. It argues we have been reading books wrong for centuries. That the text is not the only thing a book contains. That the object itself, its material history, the provenance of the thing before it became a vehicle for language, is part of what we encounter when we read. It is, admittedly, a school of thought that has not yet made significant inroads into most book clubs. But it has a point.
In the forests of the Garden Route, there are yellowwood trees ( Podocarpus latifolius), South Africa's national tree. Some specimens of which are believed to be over a thousand years old. A thousand years. Alive before the first European ship rounded the Cape. Before the VOC. Before any of the human history that has been written about this part of the world in any language. Standing in the Knysna forest, adding their rings, surviving fires and droughts and centuries of things happening around them, while every story ever told about this landscape was told by people who were born and died in the time it took the trees to grow another metre or two.
A book made from a yellowwood would be holding something older than almost any written record of the place it came from.
We don't often think about this when we read. The book is an object, and objects are easy to take for granted. But every now and then, when the light is right, or the paper is old enough to have that particular texture, or the smell of it does what old paper smell does to a person, it is worth remembering that what you are holding had a life before the story began. That the writer sat down at a desk and put words onto something ancient. That the collaboration between human imagination and the natural world goes deeper than we usually acknowledge.
The book did not begin on the first page. It began much earlier, in a forest, in the dark, in the quiet work of a tree doing what trees do.
Which is, when you think about it, not entirely unlike what a good story does. Growing in the dark for a long time, before anyone can see it, before it knows itself what it is becoming.
Have a great week!
PS: If you are reading this on your phone, the irony of receiving an email about trees and books on a device that is neither is not lost on me. Welcome anyway. The books are still here.