THE PAPER FAMINE.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 3235, 10 April 1917, Page 3

THE PAPER FAMINE.

The readers of 'St Nicholas' may be interested to know that it- costs many thousands of dollars more to publish tho magazine this year than it did last year. The increased expense is due mainly to the high juice of paper, for, in the jumping of prices, few articles have jumped higher than paper. Some grades have almost doubled. But. the cost of paper does not worry the publishers so much as does its scarcity—for the United States is confronted with a paper famine. It is difficult to get some kinds of paper at, any price. The war in Europe is responsible for so many other things. The chief ingredient of paper is cellulose, a fibrous matter made from cotton and linen rags. But cellulose is also the chief ingredient of many high explosives used in warfare. Mow the powder-mills are buying up the cotton and linen rags at fabulous prices, which the paper-mills cannot afford to pay. The result is that the cellulose which heretofore lias been going into the manufacture of paper is now going into ammunition for bombs and torpedoes, for cannon and machine guns. Cellulose, it is true, coulu be made from wood pulp, but this is also extremely difficult to get. We cannot get it at home in very large quantities, because our supply of spruce, from which it is made, is running low; and we cannot get it from Sweden, the country from which we heretofore have imported a great deal of pulp, because of the difficulty of ocean traffic. We could not buy pulp from Germany, even if its trade was open, because the Germans are now using pulp in the manufacture of explosives. The German Government have taken possession of all the wood pulp in the Empire, and has limited the manufacture of paper to such quantities as are absolutely necessary. The size of the newspaper iu Germany is limited by law, and before a German can buy a daily paper he must first produce and surrender a copy of the paper printed the day before. This old copy is sent to the paper-mill, where it is promptly converted into new paper. Thus in Germany there is economy practised in the use of paper. And it may be that economy will have to ba practised in our own country, for we are informed by those who ought to know that paper is likely to become scarcer and scarcer, and that its economy would do us no harm, for Americans are exceedingly wasteful in their use of paper.—'St. Nicholas.'