>Good paper is not made of wood, but linen, cotton, or other materials, and
>thus
>doesn't require acid to make it into pulp. Paper produced without acid
>easily lasts many hundreds of years and is, by the way, much longer-lasting
>than pergament and vellum. Paper produced in S.T. 1 could easily still be
>around in the 1600s.
>Now where could Mostali get such plant fiber?
While cotton and linen make, on the whole, better paper than wood, it is possible to produce largely wood-pulp paper which is better (more durable and permanent) than paper made from "cloth" fibers. Historically, linen (and cotton, after 1700 or so) for paper was produced from rags. Nasty rags=nasty paper. The eastern papermaking traditions, especially Japan, produce fairly low acid paper as well, because they use bark, not tree pulp. [The chemistry is pretty interesting, but even less germain than this response.] Parchment, if well made and kept dry, is at least as durable as paper. Sadly, each new information storage medium has been worse than the one before it. Baked clay, if undisturbed will last pretty much forever. CD-ROMs may last 100 years if they are stored in the best possible conditions. If they are used, 10-20 years is optomistic. Anyway, any of the ancient and Medieval techniques could last 1600 years pretty easily, even without magic.
Peter Larsen
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