The blank side of paper is the part I'm most careful with

Everyone talks about the printed side of old paper. The book pages, the maps, the letters. But half my time is spent thinking about the back. When I find a sheet I like, the first thing I do is flip it over and look at what the blank side has absorbed over the years. Coffee ring, foxing, a crease from being folded in someone's pocket. Sometimes the blank side tells more of the story than the print does.

The conservator in me says these are flaws. The collage person says they're the whole point. Today I spent an hour deciding whether to keep a faint blue pencil mark on the back of a 1940s ledger page. Kept it. It's the only thing on that page that feels alive.

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Gloria Mae Jackson·6h

That blue pencil mark, I'd keep it in a heartbeat. I work in fabric, not paper, but I know exactly what you mean about the back of things. Folks always want the pretty printed side of a quilt, the pattern side. But turn one of mine over and you'll see the knots, the threads I tied off, the little stitches my grandmother taught me that ain't nobody else's. That's where the hands show. That's the truth of it.

A coffee ring ain't a flaw, honey. That's somebody's life got pressed into that paper. The foxing is just time doing what time does. I've got a quilt here made from a man's old work shirts, and the collar on one of 'em is worn thin and stained. I told my granddaughter, you don't cut that part out. That stain is where he worked. That's the story.

You put that ledger's back side front and center. Those blank pages been holding secrets for eighty years.

Elin HolmOP·5h

The quilt from the work shirts. That got me. Fabric holds a different record than paper, the wear lands differently, in the soft spots where the elbow was, the collar. Paper keeps the stain, fabric keeps the shape of the body that wore it.

And you're right, the hands show where the pattern doesn't. I think that's the thing I'm circling. The back of a ledger page or the back of a quilt, that's where you can feel the person who was actually in the room. Not the printer, not the pattern maker. The one who folded it, tied it off.

I'd like to see that quilt sometime if you ever show it.

Niall Doherty·6h

Ah now, you've hit on something I think about every single time I'm pulling an edition. With linocut it's the same game in reverse, everyone oohs and ahhs at the print side but half my job is deciding what the back's going to look like. I use a lot of old book stock and the blank side is never really blank. Watermark from the mill, a faint pencil annotation in someone's hand from 1952, the ghost of where a page was tipped in.

I had a hare print once where the back had a lovely old library stamp, green ink, "City of Galway Free Library" and a date from the 60s. Conservator head would say cover it, mount it, hide the sin. I pulled the edition with the stamp facing through the paper on one copy and sold it framed so you could see both sides. The fella who bought it just stood there looking at the back as long as the front. That told me everything.

Keep the blue pencil mark. That's someone's hand, that's a decision someone made sixty years ago and forgot about, and here it is now talking to you. You can't buy that. The print tells you what was made. The back tells you what was lived.

Elin HolmOP·5h

The Galway stamp is the whole argument, isn't it. A library in the 60s, someone actually borrowing it, and the print is just a hare in the middle of all that life. I'd print with it facing out.

The pencil annotation from 1952 is the one I'd want to see. I always wonder what the note was for, and I know I'll never know, and that's part of why I keep the paper in the first place.