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We wanted to wrap Ulysses in paper, and tie with string or twine, staying true to how books used to be packaged for postage. I hadn't yet made-up my mind on which string to use, until a happy coincidence occured as I was en route to a meeting on Ječná street in Prague. I walked past Papírnictví Manepa, a shop that I have seen hundreds of times over the years, but never entered. It was first established at this very location in 1884 and is a magnificent relic of a bygone era. In the window I saw rolls of jute twine with handwritten price tags. Perfect I thought, and took a photo. Inside the shop is an Aladdin's cave of goodies. They "specialise" in...
"Selling supplies for offices, schools and artists. Offering children's suitcases, PVC and microtene bags, forms, stationery, adhesives, toiletries, cosmetic and drugstore items, magnets. The range also includes flower and paste honey directly from the beekeeper."
...because "supplies for offices, schools and artists", "magnets" and "honey directly from the beekeeper" are obvious bedfellows!
At a glance, the interior of the shop looks quite similar to Sweny's Pharmacy in Dublin, which also has a U-shaped counter and undeniable genius loci. Sweny's opened as a dispensing chemist in 1853 and famously features in Ulysses, where Leopold Bloom buys a bar of lemon soap while waiting for a prescription. Lemon soap can still be bought here as a souvenir. Sweny's is also where I first had the idea to launch Ulysses Whiskey x Art more than a decade ago. Had Ulysses taken place in Prague, would Bloom have bought a jar of honey at Papírnictví Manepa?
Joyce once said, "For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal." So true!
Now that we've sourced our twine, let's turn up the stream-of-consciousness to 100% and explore jute in general and our ball of jute in particular....
Our jute twine was produced by JUTA, which was established in Prague in 1920, after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918.
Meanwhile, Joyce was still living in Trieste, which had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire since 1867, but united with Italy in November 1918, at the end of World War I. He lived there for many years, teaching English and working on his literary projects. However, in July 1920, he moved to Paris at the invitation of Ezra Pound, who suggested that Paris would be a better environment for him to work on his writing, particularly on Ulysses.
JUTA survived two World Wars, communism, Soviet invasion, coupon privatization and the wholesale plundering of the Czech textile industry in the wild 1990's, during which time the word "tunneling" was introduced into the English language to describe a form of embezzlement and hollowing-out of companies in post-communist Czechoslovakia. The textile industry especially was hit hard by wave after wave of unscrupulous bastards that enriched themselves, putting waste to an industry that once employed a quarter of a million citizens.
Mercifully this was not to be the fate of JUTA, where the management successfully navigated the pirate-infested waters of the 1990's and steered the company to international success. Today JUTA employs 2,300 people and had revenue of EUR 286m in 2023. They continue to innovate and make all sorts of technical textiles, and simple jute twine, which we now use to wrap our packages.
Jute is a long, coarse, and shiny bast fiber that can be spun into strong, durable threads. It is one of the most cost-effective natural fibers, second only to cotton in terms of production volume and versatility. Composed mainly of cellulose and lignin, jute fibers are extracted from the inner bark of plants like kenaf, industrial hemp, flax and ramie. In Bangladesh, jute is known as the "golden fiber" due to its color and significant economic value.
Most jute is used for making durable and eco-friendly packaging materials, such as burlap sacks. A case in point: more than a billion jute sandbags were exported from Bengal to the trenches of World War I.
Although jute production and use declined with the rise of disposable plastic packaging, this trend is beginning to reverse as more merchants and governments phase out or ban single-use plastics.
Welcome to the journey.
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