Volume 08, Number 2
Jun 1995

Purchases and Spinoffs

• Hammermill Papers, Memphis, has acquired Old Colony Envelope, Westfield, Massachusetts.
• Noranda Forest Inc., a Canadian company, purchased Cross Pointe Paper Corp. (St. Paul, MN), on April 3 of this year from Pentair Inc. for about $200 million. All three of Cross Pointe's mills are 100% alkaline, and the company produces a lot of high-value papers, which will give the company stability during swings of the economic cycle. Its mills are: the Miami Mill, in West Carrollton, OH; the Flambeau Mill in Park Falls, WI; and the Dayton Mill in Dayton, OH.

  Noranda Forest has two paper mills: Noranda Forest Recycled Papers, in Thorold, ON; and Fraser Paper Ltd., in Madawaska, ME. Both of them make some alkaline paper and some acid paper.

• Willamette Industries has signed an agreement with Mead Corp. to purchase its Kingsport, Tennessee, paper mill. (The purchase may have already taken place, since they expected to complete it by the end of the second quarter.) Kingsport, an alkaline mill, is 70 years old and makes about 200,000 tons per year. It lost money in both 1993 and 1994. Its focus on uncoated and coated label grades is better suited to Willamette's production of uncoated paper than to Mead's primary growth business, which is coated paper for commercial printing, books and magazines.
• James River Corp. is planning to spin off most of its printing and writing paper operations to shareholders, so that it can concentrate on making consumer tissue and paperboard. At the time of writing (July 11), the company hopes to complete the process by the end of summer.

  The new company will inherit 12 mills or other operations, eight of which make printing and writing paper (Adams, MA; Berlin, NH; Guardbridge, St. Andrews, Scotland; Newark, DE; Parchment, MI; Penicuik, Midlothian, Scotland; St. Francisville, LA; and Ypsilanti, MI). About half of these eight mills make some alkaline freesheet papers. St. Francisville makes alkaline groundwood paper.

  There are two other mills that will stay with the parent company: the Wauna Mill in Clatskanie, OR, and the Camas Mill in Camas, WA. The Wauna Mill is 100% alkaline, while the Camas Mill is partly alkaline.

  The Guard Bridge mill is immortalized in Verner Clapp's "Story of Permanent/Durable Book Paper, 1115-1970," published in Restaurator Suppl. 3, 1972. William J. Barrow (whose own standard for paper permanence, based on years of research, was well known at the time) was asked in 1967 to find a mill that could supply paper meeting this standard, for a 610-volume catalog of all the books in American libraries. It would be used heavily in libraries all over the world and was too expensive to replace if it wore out, so it had to be both permanent and durable. The set was to be printed by Balding & Mansell, the London printers.

  Verner Clapp describes on p. 48 of his historical narrative how the Guard Bridge Paper Company came through. Note the extremely high fold and tear values of the paper it supplied:

  In [1967] the American Library Association (ALA) wished to take advantage of Mansell's abstracting camera for the printing of the 610-volume National Union Catalog: Pre-1956 Imprints. The use of a Barrow-type paper was written into the printing contract. In order to widen the sources of supply for such paper (which was expected to be needed at the rate of 26 tons a month for 10 years) and to lay a basis for choice through testing, Barrow went to England at ALA's request in May-June 1967 to visit a number of paper mills and testing laboratories.

  Visits to the first were very rewarding, but to the second less so, and he had to agree to do the testing himself. On August 15 he reported to ALA and Mansell that a paper made by the Guard Bridge Paper Company of Fife, Scotland, had tested at the high values of 1701 folds, 93 grams tear, and pH 8.9, initial, with excellent retention. (It was his last completed job. He died of a heart attack ten days later.) This paper was adopted for the Catalog and is ... described in a colophon in each volume as meeting or exceeding 1200 folds, 73 grams tear, and pH 9.4, initial values.