Wookey Hole Note

Wookey Hole, thankfully, has nothing to do with the Star Wars™ universe. For anyone unfamiliar, it’s a village on the southern edge of the Mendip Hills in Somerset, south-west England; the village named after a nearby limestone cave system. For centuries the area was a centre of paper-making, with the Wookey Hole mill itself, owned & operated by W.S. Hodgkinson & Co., being known for its high-quality hand-made papers.

The Hodgkinson company sold the mill ca. 1951, with paper still manufactured there commercially until 1972. Since then, the mill has been repurposed as a tourist attraction, with paper now only made at the site on a very small scale as an “experience exhibit”.

I imagine then that the box of paper and envelopes above, acquired via ebay, must be at least seventy-two years old. I like that the box informs the buyer of its being “suitable for either steel or fountain pens”: though in my view, as with most hand-made papers, it doesn’t have the ideal surface for either, with the quality of the writing experience very much depending on the properties of the ink one uses. It is excellent paper for typing on, however.