Toilet tissue, toilet roll, loo paper, bathroom tissue – whatever you call it – is a bog standard of janitorial supplies. In some form or other, toilet paper has been around at least one and a half thousand years. The use of paper for toilet paper is attested from the 6th century in China. The scholar Yan Zhitui wrote that he would not dare to use paper on which there were quotations from the classics or the names of sages for toilet purposes. In Gargantua and Pantagruel, the 16th-century French writer François Rabelais recommended using a particularly downy goose’s neck for the purpose.

Like a lot of today’s consumer goods, toilet paper emerged as a commodity in the mid- to late-19th century. Victorian toilet paper was often medicated and sold in flat sheets rather than rolls.