Detail map of Mitte, Nürnberg, Bayern, Germany Overview map of Mitte, Nürnberg, Bayern, Germany

A: Mitte, Nürnberg, Bayern, Germany

UIman Stromer's Diary, Earliest European Document on the Production of Paper

1390
Nuremberg chronicles   Nuremberga

This view of Nuremberg from the Nuremberg Chronicle by Hartmann Schedel, includes the earliest view of a paper mill in a printed book. The mill was that of Ulman Stromer that was operating outside the city walls because of the noise and stench of the processes. The papermill is depicted in the lower right corner of the hand-colored woodcut.

In 1390 Ulman Stromer, a member of the Senate governing the city of Nuremberg, recorded in a manuscript that he was converting a mill on the Pegnitz river just outside the western wall of the city to the production of paper.

The manager of a trading company which had been importing paper from Italy, Stromer established his paper mill to meet the growing demand for paper in Germany. To produce paper he hired Italian workers with technical experience in the trade. Stromer's diary, preserved in the Germanisches National Museum in Nuremberg, is the earliest European document on the production of paper. It also includes an account of the earliest known "labor strike" in the history of papermaking, though exactly what "strike" meant in this context, so long before labor unions existed, may not be entirely clear.

Dard Hunter, The Literature of Papermaking 1390-1800 [1925] 9-11.

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