Too Good to Waste

'...Too Good to Waste is a delight of well-explained granularity. There are years of careful archival accumulation on show here, conveyed with an excited delight that means the book is a pleasure to read. Too Good to Waste is also a beautiful object - heavy in the hand, like something that will endure, and teeming with high-quality black-and-white images and coloured plates.'Adam Smyth, The Book Collector, vol. 75, no. 3, Autumn 2026Paper was a precious commodity in the eighteenth century: every sheet was made by hand. There was therefore a significant market in recycling substandard paper from paper mills and discarded proofs and sheets from printers and booksellers for secondary use, alongside a black market in which stealing and receiving stolen paper took place on a vast scale. A single piece of paper could be termed ‘waste’ and yet sold for cash three times in succession, on each occasion performing a useful function. The end user would keep the newly purchased ‘waste’ or paper wrapping in a special drawer from which it would be taken for a myriad household purposes, including cooking, needlework, decoration and hygiene. Popular satirical prints depicted explicit paper uses, while creators of flamboyant papier mâché ceilings concealed the material by gilding it.With 90 illustrations, and drawing on letters from a range of people from farmers to notable authors and members of the aristocracy, together with meticulous archival research, this book traces the extraordinary history of ingenious paper recycling in eighteenth-century England.