In 1586, the first wind-powered paper mill in the Netherlands was established at Alkmaar, north of Amsterdam, beginning a revolution in paper production that would make the Netherlands the world's leading publisher and book exporter by the mid-seventeenth century. Wind-powered paper mills dramatically reduced the cost of paper by replacing slow, labour-intensive beating processes with continuous wind-driven stamping mills, making books and pamphlets affordable for an unprecedented proportion of the literate population. The Dutch paper industry, powered by windmills, became the material foundation for the printing and publishing industries that spread Enlightenment ideas across Europe.

The wind-powered paper mill is one of the unsung heroes of literary history: cheap Dutch paper enabled the mass printing of books, pamphlets, and newspapers that disseminated poetry from Donne and Milton to Voltaire and beyond. Many of the most important literary works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were first printed on Dutch paper. The Dutch publishing industry, underpinned by wind-powered mills, also provided a haven for politically dangerous texts — including works by Descartes, Locke, and Spinoza — whose ideas profoundly shaped the intellectual world in which literary culture operated.