_Cotton_ paper was first manufactured from the natural product; but later, as the industry was extended to regions where cotton was not grown and into which it was not imported, other substances were used instead of the raw cotton. "In Spain," it is said, "flax was the first material used, then cotton." The practice of mixing rags--first woolen, then cotton, and later linen--gradually came into use. Near the close of the eleventh century (1085) is designated as the date when rags were first used for paper in Spain; linen paper appeared in 1100. "From the time rags began to be used in Europe they rapidly displaced other materials on account of the double use of the fibre composing them (used first for clothing or domestic purposes). Rags held sway in the paper industry for many centuries, but not entirely to the exclusion of numerous other materials."[31] _Linen_ paper, though known much earlier, came into general use in the fourteenth century. It was manufactured not only in response to the demand for improvement which characterizes all inventions but because linen was then less expensive than cotton. The earliest existing document on paper is a deed of King Roger of Sicily, 1102 A. D. There are other documentary records of Sicilian kings during the twelfth century. "The manufacture of paper from linen rags," says Thalheimer, "was a humble but essential antecedent to the art of printing, for the costliness of parchment or vellum was as effectual a barrier to the multiplication of books as the labor of transcribing them." Even before the Christian Era, the cost of books was largely the cost of the material--papyrus--upon which they were mostly written. Mr. Putnam suggests that "if printing had come into Europe in the first century, the world might to-day be buried under the accumulated mass of its literature"--no, not unless the invention of paper had been coterminous or had preceded. All other and earlier materials for the embodiment and preservation of literature were eventually superseded by the manufacture of paper. Concerning the displacement of other materials, there is good authority for the claim that "in the second half of the fourteenth century the use of paper for all literary purposes had become well established in all western Europe; and in the course of the fifteenth century it had gradually superseded vellum. In manuscripts of this latter period it is not unusual to find a mixture of vellum and paper, a vellum sheet forming the outer and inner leaves of a quire while the rest are of paper."[32]