Chewed
Paper.

Persia and Kashmir. Long before the craft table, papier-mâché was luxury. Persian scholars carried their reed pens in a qalamdan, a slim pen box often made of papier-mâché, lacquered and painted with flowers and birds so fine they look like miniatures. In Kashmir the craft is still a living tradition, sold as boxes, bowls and ornaments.

Victorian furniture. In the 18th and 19th centuries, English workshops pressed paper into hard, smooth panels, lacquered them black and painted them with gold and mother-of-pearl. They made trays, boxes and, yes, chairs you could actually sit on.

Pedro Linares was born in Mexico City in 1906 into a family of cartoneros, papier-mâché makers who built piñatas, carnival masks and the Judas figures that get blown up with firecrackers at Easter.

Around 1936, the family's story goes, he fell seriously ill. In his fever he dreamed of a forest full of impossible animals, donkeys with butterfly wings, roosters with bull horns, lions with eagle heads, all shouting one word: "¡Alebrijes!" When he recovered, he started building them out of paper and paste and painting them in the loudest colours he could find.

Nobody is sure what "alebrije" means. One idea is that it came from the prayers his family whispered over him while they thought he was dying.

Here's the twist. The alebrijes most tourists bring home now are carved wood, painted in Oaxaca. That style came later, inspired by his. Mexico City's version, the original, is paper. In 2019 the city declared Pedro Linares's alebrijes part of its intangible cultural heritage. His sons and grandsons, including Leonardo Linares, still make them near the Mercado de Sonora.

Japan: the dog that guards babies. In Japan, papier-mâché is hariko. The inu-hariko, the puppy doll on our cover, is a charm for safe childbirth and a healthy child. Dogs have big litters and easy births, so a paper dog went into the wedding set and the nursery. Japan's famous red daruma dolls are hariko too: you paint in one eye when you set a goal, and the other when you reach it.

Italy: the floats. The town of Viareggio in Tuscany runs one of Europe's biggest carnivals. In 1925 local builders started making the floats from carta a calco, papier-mâché cast in moulds over frames of wood and iron, much lighter than the plaster used before. The floats grew. Today the biggest are about 14 metres tall and weigh around 40 tons, with moving heads and arms, built all year in a purpose-built workshop complex, the Cittadella del Carnevale.

Vermont: the giant puppet barn. Bread and Puppet Theater started on New York's Lower East Side in 1963 and moved to a farm in Glover, Vermont, in 1974. Its founder, Peter Schumann, built enormous papier-mâché puppets for street protests and pageants, and handed out his own sourdough rye bread at shows. The old barn on the farm is a museum stacked floor to ceiling with puppets. Admission is free.