A few months back, we received an email from a gentleman named Ian Spellerberg, who lives in Christchurch, New Zealand. “Lovely article about letter openers,” he wrote. “However, what is illustrated is a mix of letter openers and paper-knives. They are quite different.”
“Paper-knives are dull by design.”
In fact, letter openers and paper-knives represent only half of Spellerberg’s expertise on this arcane corner of old office supplies. As the author of Reading & Writing Accessories: A Study of Paper-Knives, Paper Folders, Letter Openers and Mythical Page Turners, now available in the United States from Oak Knoll Press, Spellerberg has become an important new authority on implements designed to do controlled damage to paper. In the process, he’s turned what most people thought they knew about these objects, particularly about page turners, on its head.
Spellerberg didn’t set out to be a firebrand of the collectibles world, but as a professor of nature conservation at Lincoln University in Christchurch for 20 years and the Director of Environmental Sciences at Southampton University in England before that, his scientific side frequently takes over, even when it comes to something as ostensibly uncomplicated as a fondness for office antiques.
Top: An assortment of wooden paper-knives from Spellerberg’s collection. From top to bottom, bamboo knife with a ruler; a sickle-shaped Mauchline-ware paper-knife with poker and transfer work; an olive wood paper-knife inscribed “The Mount of Olives” in Hebrew; a walnut paper-knife hallmarked 1881 and featuring a wooden soldier’s head carved from a palm nut. Above: Letter openers are often made from precious materials. From top to bottom, a greenstone and silver opener from 1903; an Art Nouveau ivory opener with enameled silver; and a letter opener featuring a sterling silver handle.
It all started with a visit several years ago to London’s Portobello Road, known internationally for its enormous concentration of antiques shops and stalls. “Among the many treasures on offer,” Spellerberg writes in the Preface to Reading & Writing Accessories, “were some odd-looking hand-held ‘blades.’ They were between 11 and 14 inches long. The blades (although not sharp) were made of various materials, including tortoiseshell, ivory, and brass. I was told that they were ‘Victorian page turners’ for turning the pages of books, magazines, or newspapers.” On that day, Spellerberg purchased what was advertised as a tortoiseshell page turner with a silver handle, although, he writes, “it should in fact be called ‘turtle shell’ because the material comes from the carapace of the marine hawksbill turtle (not a land-based tortoise).”
Given Spellerberg’s natural-sciences background, that error was easy for him to catch, but the object’s misidentification as “tortoiseshell” was not its chief falsehood. “I had never heard of page turners before,” Spellerberg told me when we Skyped recently. “The thought of using a hand-held blade for turning pages seemed rather romantic.”
Impossibly so, as it turns out: After researching the topic for several years, Spellerberg concluded that page turners simply did not exist during the Victorian Era. In fact, according to Spellerberg, page turners didn’t exist during any historical period at all, making them the unicorns, if you will, of office collectibles, mythical objects that tell us more about how we imagine people lived rather than how they actually did.
In 1907, when this catalog page was printed, paper-knives were still being sold. The paper-knives at lower-left are similar to the one Spellerberg purchased on Portobello Road.
“I wanted to find out more about this page turner I had just bought,” Spellerberg continues, “but when I started delving into old newspapers, trade catalogs, and even English literature for references to them, I couldn’t find a thing. That led to correspondences with lots of very helpful people at libraries and museums around the world. Still, I came up with no historical references to page turners.”
It wasn’t that he couldn’t find anything about page turners by searching for keywords like “antique page turners” at Google. Doing that today will still yield numerous page-turner pages at eBay, Etsy, Pinterest, and other sites, all of which are fairly brimming with objects that Spellerberg is convinced served an entirely different purpose. “If you see these things on the Internet and they’re described as page turners, often by some of the most reputable auction companies in the world, you assume they’re page turners,” he says. Obviously the objects themselves are real enough, and many are definitely old, but page turners, Spellerberg says, they are not.
It didn’t take long for Spellerberg to figure out that what he had really purchased that day on Portobello Road was a paper-knife, whose thin, wide blade and dull edges were designed to follow the creases of a book’s uncut pages and expertly, gently, tear them apart.
Souvenir paper-knives from Egypt made (from top to bottom) of bone, plastic, brass, and ivory.
Uncut pages were common to Victorian Era and earlier books, artifacts of the bookbinding practices of the day. As Spellerberg explains in Reading & Writing Accessories, long sheets of paper were folded numerous times to form a “signature” of pages or “leaves,” which would be printed on both sides. Signatures would be printed, collated, and then bound (which usually meant “sewn”) to create a book. “Most of the leaves were cut during the binding process,” he writes. “However, since all books were bound by hand at that time, leaves were sometimes left uncut and could not be opened unless they were cut.” Paper-knives made such books readable.
It wasn’t just books that required paper-knives to be read, which is why the tools came in all sizes. There were long ones for newspapers and magazines, as well as shorter ones for diminutive books made to fit in the palm of the hand. Regardless of their size, some were painted in handsome designs while others were carved and fitted with sterling-silver handles, transforming these prosaic implements of paper destruction into small works of art. And, of course, a great many paper-knives were treated as handheld advertisements, sold at tourist destinations as souvenirs or given away by companies wishing to extend their brands, as we might put it today.
Page turners, then, were actually paper-knives, and paper-knives were the tools readers employed to get at the content inside an “unopened” book. Which sort of brings us back to letter openers. Wouldn’t letter openers have worked just as well to sever the uncut pages of books as paper-knives, and vice versa?
An ivory paper-knife with an otter’s foot for the handle.
As a matter of fact, they did not. “When people ask me, ‘What do you collect?’ and I say, ‘Well, I’ve got a few hundred paper-knives,’ they’ll say, ‘My grandmother used one of those and to open her letters.’ So it’s a common belief that paper-knives and letter openers are the same thing. I’m not the first person, by the way, to argue that they’re different, but my book is the first time the differences have been described based on primary evidence.”
Some of that evidence takes the form of how letter openers—which are usually dagger shaped to allow their points to get into the unsealed corners of an envelope—and paper-knives—which tend to be rounded and blunt—were marketed. But Spellerberg also did his own empirical research to determine if an accessory that looked like it could be a paper-knife was really a letter opener, or the other way around. Not surprisingly, one of the trickiest shapes to test was the scimitar, which has both the point of a letter opener and the wide blade that’s required to make a smooth cut with a paper-knife.
“That was a puzzle,” Spellerberg admits of initial confusion over scimitars. “I mean, there they are in the catalogs, described as paper-knives, but I hesitated about them for quite a long time. So I experimented. I’d take a piece of paper, fold it, crease it, and then see how scimitar-shaped tools worked as paper-knives. Naturally I tried them out on old envelopes, too. They didn’t work very well on envelopes, so eventually I became convinced they really were intended to be paper-knives.”
Mauchline-ware paper-knives. From top to bottom, a cricket-bat design, tartan and fern variations, and a combination paper-knife and book marker.
The key difference, though, between paper-knives and letter openers is the relative sharpness of the blade. Most letter openers are sharper than paper-knives—when one is facing a pile of envelopes to open, speed rather than accuracy is the primary goal. In contrast, paper-knives are dull by design. “You never want to cut the unopened pages of a book with a sharp knife,” Spellerberg says, “because a sharp knife will veer off the crease. It doesn’t need the crease to cut through the paper, so you can do a lot of damage to a book. Paper-knives are not sharp, but they do come to a clean, thin edge. That’s an essential aspect of their design.”
At the height of the paper-knife era, or so Spellerberg likes to unscientifically surmise, people found great pleasure in sitting down in their favorite chair with a new book in one hand and their best paper-knife in the other to cut open the pages and begin to read. “People loved their books,” he says. “They took pride in their libraries and in being well-read. The preparation prior to reading was a part of that.”
By the end of the 19th century, though, most publishers had equipment that trimmed the uncut pages of their products, obviating the need for paper-knives and the ritual of opening the uncut leaves of a new book. And today, of course, a reader doesn’t even need a book, let alone a specialized tool to make it ready for reading. “I hate the idea of that,” Spellerberg says. “I don’t have one of these Kindle things. I love going to a bookshop and picking up a book, to feel its weight, to take in the smell of its paper and ink, to physically turn its pages. Sometimes I worry that the sensory side of our lives is dying out.”
Paper folders or “creasers,” as they were also known, were used to fold letters for insertion into envelopes, which is why they were often decorated with postal information. Unlike paper-knives and letter openers, paper folders were held along their top horizontal edges, so they needed to be wide but did not require handles.
Dying out, sure, but not dead yet, as I learned from Matthew Haley of Bonhams, who has spoken to Collectors Weekly before about rare books. “I was once told, but have never confirmed, that people still occasionally request books that have never been opened at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford,” Haley says. “They are lent a paper-knife for the purposes of cutting the pages.” In fact, as Rosie Burke of the Bodelian told me via email, “I’m pleased to confirm that it is true that after all these years we still have many books with uncut pages—either completely uncut or only partially cut. Staff will issue paper-knives to readers for certain books, but anything that is particularly old or fragile will only be cut by either reading-room staff or a member of our conservation team.”
This is obviously good news for readers—as a library, the Bodelian is in the business of spreading knowledge rather than keeping it secreted within the uncut pages of the books on its shelves. But the utility of paper-knives raises an interesting dilemma for book collectors. Is a book with uncut pages more valuable than a comparable volume whose leaves have been sundered, however carefully, by a paper-knife?
“Generally speaking,” Haley says, “there is a slight premium placed by collectors on uncut or ‘unopened’ copies, as they are closer to how the book would have been originally supplied by the bookseller. It’s one of the fascinating ironies of book collecting,” he adds, “that an unreadable book could be worth more than one that’s ready to read.”
A paper-knife inserted between the uncut leaves of an 1882 book titled The History of Indian Literature. Each signature has 16 leaves requiring four cuts. The paper-knife is from Sri Lanka and is made from palm wood, with bone and horn decoration.
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Very interesting – I know some bookbinders but have never really thought about older uncut signatures and the need for paper knives like this. The paper knives that I’m more familiar have exceedingly sharp, flat blades and are used for cutting sheets of paper while making books.
Oh, and “South Hampton” (in the third paragraph) should probably be Southampton. Thanks for the catch! -Eds.
Great information. It seems that I have some paper knives along with letter openers.
Interesting article Ben!
From the way that signatures were folded after printing, it would seem that a printing press would have to arrange four pages of text in opposite directions, and in non-serial order to print a single side of a four-page sheet, and again for the other side of the sheet. Was there some printers’ lore associated with arranging a page of set type, to keep this straight?
I imagine that there were different arrangements used for papers folded in folio, quarto, etc. Were different sizes of paper knives employed for books with signatures made from more highly folded sheets?
A flat sheet is “imposed” in the correct order so that after folding (creating a signature), the pages read correctly. Most books printed today are in 16 page signatures. Signatures are then stacked, or collated, to create the text of a book, trimmed on three sides, and case bound.
Obviously, modern machinery has done away with the need for a paper knife!
Such an informative article! I purchased a “page turner” today from an antique fair and having never heard of a page turner, I turned to Google of course and came across this article. I’m happy to now know that I own a lovely paper knife which will be in good company with the antique letter openers I already own.
I’ve used what I call “folding bones” which are similar to the creasers you mention: they’re very efficient helpers for folding sheets that one wants a nice crease on. I use them to prepare mailings: they are also used regularly by hand bookbinders (and were used back when hand bookbinding was the only kind). A pen can be a functional equivalent, but a good folding bone is ergonomically a lot more efficient.
I’ve occasionally gotten a new book that has some pages uncut. A paper knife would be a handy tool to have!
(My letter opener is definitely pointed. Steel blade, with its original balsa-and-vinyl handle replaced by one of ebony, which fits the hand and gives it better balance.)
We have an old Indian carving set but know nothing about it. How do you tell the difference between worn wood or plastic? Bob
I’m writing a City Slicker Western taking place in 1881/2.
Within the last month I came across ‘paper knives’, in use because newspaper ink besides smearing, hard to get out of gloves or off one’s hands and was poisonous. Paper turners or paper knives were found in any good hotel. (So I have to go back and add them…take out a cheap white cotton glove scene on a Pullman coach and so on.)
Ladies did not want to ruin their expensive gloves with newspaper ink.
I did not find any paper knives/paper turners, ones large enough to turn a newspaper, listed in the 1894-5 Montgomery Ward, or the 1902 Sears and Roebucks replica’s. In the Ward catalog I did find paper knives but they were too small to turn a newspaper sheet. (Pg 110 where it could have been was missing, in the re-print editor chopped more than I liked.)
The wealthy didn’t need a long paper knife; their butler ironed their newspaper.
“Folding bones” is a different type of tool, used otherwise.
Bill
Well, it’s nice to find out the actual use of the piece of carved bamboo that was used to chastise us as children. Much less intimidating than a hairbrush. Wish I’d had it in college when my Librairie Larousse books came with uncut pages. Thank you for a fascinating article.
Back in ’99, I sent in an ILL request for something that’d been written back in the 40’s. It came from a university in Eastern Canada, if I recall right. It looked astoundingly pristine for a book that old, and what did I find but there were some pages uncut. Not knowing better, I used one of my many sharp knives, and concluded I had one more story to tell.
I’m considering getting one of the proper tools you describe, in case this ever happens again.
Been to an antiques fair today. Being a collector of bookmarks, what caught my eye was described as a “Page Turner”. It was very lovely, and I examined it for a long time before being strong and not making a purchase. I was even offered an equally beautiful and very delicate mother of pearl bookmark to make the purchase even more worth while. Having just read this article I’m glad I held my nerve and didnt purchase what I now recognise as a paper knife. Thanks for the article – very illuminating.
I just bought a twelve-volume set of books that contain several uncut pages. As I do want to read this literature I wondered if you could direct me to a place or places where I might most likely purchase a paper knife. At first I was most disappointed with my new-found “prize” but now I find this a most interesting discovery thanks to your helpful article on uncut pages.
Thank you for your assistance,
Annette
I read and re-read this – and I either missed something or you did.
There is such a thing as a page turner. It was used mid 1800s to (probably) early 1900 by platform performers/elocutionists/lecturers to …turn pages of what they were “reading” – although often (if not usually) the material was memorized. The book and the page turner and the lecturn were “props.”
I was in Wudang China a couple of months ago, I saw page turners being used by the monks during a blessing as their books are not bound but folded. The Victorians had so many things imported, can it be these were then put to another use as our books were bound so they wouldn’t work in the way they were designed but the name stuck?
to 4: Daniel Kim
The arrangement of the printer’s layout is called imposition.
I found this article after being interested in a long stick like implement used by Rudolph Valentino to turn the pages of a huge newspaper on a stand in a silent movie from around 1922. I guessed it might be called a page turner, it was nothing like the paper cutters in this article, so I think they did actually exist, maybe in gentlemen’s clubs and libraries.
What lovely sense about “page turners”. The antiques trade is useless about how items were used. (Antiques Road Show experts some pf the worst) Now could you tackle “Go-to-beds” and the nonsense invented by dealers. Candles and chamber sticks were kept by a fireplace and lit using spills and then lit the way to bed. “Go-to-beds” were desk match holders for melting sealing wax. I have a lovely example in Mauchline Tartan ware which has a perpetual calander. Useful at ones desk but why would anyone want a calander in bed!
I knew about this but thanks have learnec more.
Don’t forget to note that the cut pages are called deckeled
Having recently purchased what was described as a “Late Victorian Page Turner”, my interest in the beautiful item increased once delivered, I happily discovered this brilliant article!
My gratitude to the author of this article and to the professor responsible for it’s forensic for sights!!!!!
I think Mr. Spellerberg has gotten a little too worked-up—or, at least, unnecessarily pedantic. He’s getting caught-up in terminology which very often varies over time or from one part of the world to another. I have been buying and selling “page turners” for 25 years and have always known that they were used to “cut open” any uncut pages in books (thus, allowing a reader to “turn” the “page”). Spellerberg thinks he’s clarifying a distinction—by calling them “paper knives”—though many objects are referred to by various names in differing times and places. A good example of this: a “toilet” might be called the restroom, bathroom, WC, bog, loo, gent’s, crapper, can or “the lav.” All words (more or less) describe the same object (or place) though they are, indeed, different words. Likewise, “paper knife” and “page turner” are used interchangeably in the antiques trade—though they both refer to the same blunt instrument.
I have a page turner I found at a garage sale about 15 yrs ago the man was in his 90’s it was in the free box he said it was his great grandfather’s lincoln paint stirrer totally covered in layers of paint that peeled right off and it’s beautiful handle is a eagle head of metal and I think the blade is bone, I have never seen one like it
I very much appreciate the article. I have a number of books which are “un-cut” and I am always in a quandary whether to cut them or not as I read them. Sometimes, I seek a peek inside the uncut pages and can make out the text enough to leave them uncut. That way someone else can enjoy the experience of meeting an un-cut volume. This is one more facet that induces me to collect older books. I am glad to know the page cutter is not sharp. If the prices are too steep I will resort to making my own page cutter. Heretofore, I have been using a letter opener.
James’s reply — #23 above — filled me with delight. It suggests a lesson we lovers of history and ephemera, would be wise to heed. Let’s not overthink. Sure, underthinking is ignorance, but overthinking is pedantry. Eyes glaze over and friends flee. One more thing: I still regret the signed copy of Yeats whose uncut pages I separated with a butter knife.
Been there (the Bodleian) and done that (borrowed a paper knife for a book with uncut pages). Now I feel very fortunate!
Really appreciated this article. Great information.
May I suggest that paper knives began to, unofficially, be called “page turners” by those who used them since they had to open the crease before they could turn the page. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time the public renamed at item that stuck!