SetPoint: The Future of Boxes...and Beyond, Paper360º July/August 2025

I just started reading a fascinating book called Paper: Paging Through History, by Mark Kurlansky*. It tells the story of paper’s invention and its spread around the world, as varying civilizations reached a point of development that required writing on something besides stone, clay, silk, or animal skins. Historians believe that the first writing was developed by the Sumerians some 3,300 years before the supposed invention of paper... so a lot happened before our hero, Cai Lun, did the whole cellulosefibers- on-a-screen thing in about 105 CE.

Today, our increasingly global society is rich with paper. Thousands of types exist, and the uses of paper in our daily lives extend far beyond the written word. How many other substances have been so remarkably adaptable? We’re still doing the whole cellulose-fibers-on-a-screen thing, but paper has answered thousands of new demands, accommodated thousands of new applications, and capitalized on thousands of new technologies during its tiny sliver of human history.

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