Exploring ancient sites and rugged villages throughout the Indian sub-continent, the Himalayas and Central Asia for decades, paper historian, Alexandra Soteriou, charts the migration of papermakers and shares a seldom-seen view of their stories, secrets, materials, methods and artistic and decorative expressions.

Soteriou’s highly visual presentation focuses on the lost traditions including a look at: proto-papers from Pakistan’s high mountain Silk Route villages, Indian archaeological ruins that tie traditional ways of making paper to their Chinese roots, pulping tools such as an Uzbek wooden stamper, Himalayan hand pounders and Indian fermenting pits, raw materials that form the character of paper, papermaking tools including elegant reed molds and stone and ivory polishers and decorative or colored papers including marbled works.

Insight into how method impacts the look and quality of paper will be discussed. Additionally, artisan’s secrets about translucent animal membrane interleaving sheets, papers made strong by double-dip do pani kagaz, insect repellant coatings, string-and-powder tools used to keep calligraphy on line and image-copying methods, will be described.