#the category of ephemera is fascinating to me. the stuff that wasn’t meant to stick around like wrappers and ads and flyers

[j-esbian]

one of my biggest pet peeves and my smallest hill to die on is when people act like parchment is just The Old Fashioned Paper, or worse, use those terms interchangeably. it’s especially egregious in the fantasy genre, of course.

and i can kind of see how they got there: a lot of surviving texts from medieval europe are on parchment and that influences the way people perceive things; because ofc western fantasy draws a LOT of things from medieval times, that just gets exported along with the ideas that thatched houses are constantly falling apart and gothic churches come pre-blackened with soot

there’s a lot of ground to cover with the history of the written word, but the thing about paper is that it really took off because the gutenberg press made it fast and cheap to make books and paper was CHEAP and much easier to produce. parchment is expensive and, quite frankly, a much more limited resource (and it also didn’t disappear after the printing press took off. i’ve seen books printed on vellum, but by that point it was for the novelty/explicitly because it was so expensive). but it does have significant longevity vs paper, so of course it was usually reserved for important cultural items. people wouldn’t be using parchment to make a flyer for the county fair or to advertise a job, and probably only used it for correspondence if they’re very rich. granted, before the printing boom galvanized literacy levels (because it made reading material cheaper and more accessible), generally only rich people were literate and would have a need for something to read and write on, but there have been pamphlets forever

paper existed before the 13th century and honestly, whether it was anachronistic in real life shouldn’t bother you in a made up setting and anyway PLEASE remember that paper and parchment are not the same thing