The mendacity of wallpaper

From The Atlantic: "The history of wallpaper is a story of mendacity, of the many forms lying can take. Wallpaper has been guilty of little white lies, like visually altering the proportions of a room or projecting your idle fancies onto the four walls—and also of more outright deception, of social pretension, even the erasure of history. According to "The Wallpaper Book" by Geneviève Brunet, paper itself was invented by a Chinese court official named Tsai Lun in 105 B.C.E., as a mixture of mulberry bark, bamboo fibers, linen, and hemp. Almost immediately … people began hand-painting it to display on walls. Some of the earliest wallpapers depicted scenes of genealogy or the gods, or brought a false natural paradise indoors."