One for the books
For Maxine Chowles, paper is more than just a way to make a living – it’s a way of life.
Born and raised in South Africa, Maxine’s earliest relationship with paper began at home. On her first day of school in 1988, her mother, Val Chowles, marked a beginning of her own, starting a new job at Sappi as an order flow clerk. Over the next twenty-seven years, Val built a career that culminated in her retirement (“very happily”, notes Maxine) as a national sales manager for business forms, her work having quietly shaped the texture of Maxine’s childhood.
Maxine remembers what the paper smelled like at the (now closed) Adamas Mill in Port Elizabeth, where her mother worked for several years, and how Val would hold promotional “customer days”, setting up projects to engage and educate. Often this would involve a paper-making lesson, and Maxine remembers loving the handmade papers her mother often brought home, the feel and weight of them.
This sparked one of her earliest realisations, Maxine says, that “you could make something yourself – it wasn’t a product that came from the shops. And you could have this beautiful piece of paper, with petals in it, or seeds, or something like that.”. And Sappi products didn’t only infiltrate Maxine’s life at home… starting in the 1990s, with the introduction of the blue Sappi logo, the company provided educational materials (primarily workbooks and posters) to schools across the country, meaning almost every child who attended school in South Africa from the 1990s through to about 2010 became familiar with the Sappi name and logo.
Seventeen years ago, in a fateful turn of events, Maxine followed in her mother’s footsteps, accepting a job offer to work for Sappi. Maxine left South Africa for Brussels, going to work at Sappi headquarters right across from the city’s famous Foret de Soignes, a constant reminder of all that trees make possible. In Brussels, Maxine met her husband, Luis Marujo, an ex-pat from Portugal, and today they are a Belgian family of four raising two daughters, Catarina and Grace, ages ten and six, in a world in which paper and books feature heavily.
You can pass on the joy. And when it starts to fall apart, that’s okay, because it can be recycled into something new.
Maxine Chowles
And her husband Luis is not only a poet (his book of poetry, Diálogos Silenciosos, was published in September 2025) but also an artisan bookbinder besides managing a Chocolate Shop in the city centre. During the pandemic, he taught himself the art of bookbinding and today runs workshops on book binding alongside his business, Marujito Books, which sells his intricately bound, handmade notebooks. “Isn’t it interesting,” Maxine points out, “that in the world we currently live, even though Covid made so much possible through online interactions, there is suddenly the desire for people to want physical notebooks again. That need hold to something beautiful, like a little notebook, even the ability to make your own and to be invested in this paper product.”
Maxine sees paper as the “medium towards the emotion”, a way to unlock and share feeling and to help people, particularly children, to thrive. As an example, she elaborates on the joy and bonding that comes from reading to her daughters at night (something that could never be captured on a tablet or a screen), or how learning skills on paper helps children to grow and evolve at their own pace, to sit with ambiguity and develop problem solving and creativity – whereas educational technology can often deliver mostly answers and absolutes.
And it doesn’t stop there. Last year Maxine’s daughter Catarina’s school launched a project exploring written communications; the children were asked to bring in paper correspondence from home, everything from paper bills (increasingly harder to find) to postcards to proper letters. Catarina was inspired by the project and her mother’s stories to want to begin an old-school pen-pal relationship with a friend in Germany, thereby continuing the generational connection to paper.
Maxine remains fascinated by paper both professionally and personally, particularly how it continues to facilitate meaningful interactions and dialogues in her life. “I’ve always loved to read books,” she says, “the tactile feel of a physical book. You can’t let me loose in a stationary shop.”
What’s more, having now worked in the industry for almost two decades, Maxine jokes, “I cannot walk into a grocery store without going ‘fibre-based product, fibre-based product’, from the cereal boxes to the tea sachets… so now I look all the time at the impacts of paper.” When Maxine thinks about “Made for Life” she thinks about the circularity of paper and books”. Paper and books are not only renewable and recyclable, but also encourage literacy, self-expression and imagination. With paper, “You can pass on the joy. And when it starts to fall apart, that’s okay, because it can be recycled into something new.”
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