Unlike a canvas in the art world; the sheet of paper is not a respected piece of art form and also a forgotten one. Mak shows us how true this is when explaining how we as a society have been using paper for essentially for over two millenia, and we have never really looked into the piece of paper itself. That we have always looked past it and perhaps, we may have read the page to quickly (literally). “In our haste to establish a history of the book, we have read the page too quickly. The page has remained a favored spaced and metaphor for the graphic communication ideas over the span of centuries and across different cultural milieux – Yet the page has become transparent, disappearing in its very function”(Mak 8). Mak is telling us that we as a society have never appreciated paper and what it has done for us even though its our preferred choice of space to share our imagination. It is indeed more than just a container in which ideas can be woven into it and that more is the history in which we often forget about quiet often. As Mak states in the quote, we constantly associate drawing and writing on a paper which is its function, but never saw past its function to truly learn about the material and history of the paper. Pretty ironic considering how we are never taught about the history of paper even though we constantly use it or see it almost every single day of our lives.

I too, am a person who never really paid much attention to the page. I always viewed it as a place to explore one’s imagination, but its physical aspect was something I never took into thought. Which is crazy considering how I grew up knowing the differences between the material of paper, but never really the why its using that specific material. Mak and Borsuk’s ideas of looking past the content and looking into the physical form of these art pieces reveals to us that we as a society are starting to lose the real history of some important things because we are blinded by the power of its function.