No single person invented rolling papers. Smokers were rolling tobacco in paper before any of today's brands existed, and the oldest brands tell different origin stories. Rizla says its founding family made the first paper for rolling. JOB's home city credits it with France's first cigarette paper factory. Zig-Zag says it has been making papers for more than 145 years.
What follows is what each of those records actually says, including where the brands' own dates disagree.
Before the brands: paper booklets in Spain
Alcoy, a paper-making town in Spain's Alicante province, had a rolling-paper industry by the early 1800s. In an article in the Spanish outlet El Salto, historian Ramón Molina dates the town's first paper mill to 1755, built by the Albors family.
Molina also dates the step that matters here. According to the article, a company was formed in Alcoy in 1815 to turn the sheets smokers were already using into booklets, and in the 1830s the first workshops devoted only to making those booklets opened. By the end of the nineteenth century, the article says, 43 of the 62 booklet workshops counted across Spain belonged to Alcoy and its surrounding industry.
In other words, people were rolling in paper first, and an industry grew up to sell it to them in a more convenient form.
Rizla and the Lacroix family
Rizla tells the longest story. The brand's own history page starts in France in 1532. It credits the 1660s, "after years of experimenting," with "the first paper made for rolling," and says that in 1796 Napoleon gave the Lacroix family permission to supply his troops.
The name comes from rice paper: riz is French for rice, and the "la" comes from Lacroix. On when that happened, the brand's sources disagree. Rizla's history page places the move to rice paper, and the name, in the 1790s. Imperial Brands, the company that owns Rizla, dates the same change to 1886, saying the Lacroix Rolling Paper Company swapped tissue paper for rice paper and that "the iconic Rizla brand is born."
Rizla's page also dates two later features. It says that in 1942 Rizla made "the first complete rolling paper with a brand-new gum strip," and that in 1948 its papers gained cut corners to make rolling easier.
JOB and Jean Bardou
Stanford University's collection of historical tobacco advertising says JOB papers were first made in 1838, patented in 1849 and originally sold in small booklets in France. It credits their design to Jean Bardou, and says he labeled them with a diamond between his initials, J.B., which gave the brand its name.
The city of Perpignan, in southern France, tells the same story in its visitor guide to the Hôtel Pams, a building Pierre Bardou bought in 1857. The guide says Jean Bardou filed a patent in 1849 for shaping cigarette papers, along with the trademark, and that the brand's name came from his initials. It describes the family firm as running from 1838 to 1913, and says the building once housed the first cigarette paper factory in France. Jean's son Pierre won the right to add Job to the family name in 1878.
Zig-Zag and the Braunstein name
Zig-Zag is the third of the old French names. Its website says the company has been making rolling papers for "over 145 years," and its classic packs carry the Braunstein name: zigzag.com describes one pack as featuring "Papeteries Braunstein Paris branding" and another as featuring "Braunstein Frères France branding." Frères is French for brothers.
Zig-Zag does not publish a detailed history on its own site, so we have kept to what it says there. Other dates for the brand appear elsewhere, but we could not confirm them from the company itself.
From tobacco to cannabis
The early booklets were made for tobacco smokers. Perpignan's guide describes JOB as cigarette paper, Stanford lists it in a collection of tobacco advertising, and the Alcoy booklets were made from the paper smokers were already using. Cannabis users adopted the same papers, and the vocabulary came along later. Our history of why it's called weed traces when the word "joint" took on its cannabis meaning, and how the blunt got its name from a cigar brand rather than a paper one.
Our step-by-step guides to rolling a joint and rolling a blunt cover how papers and wraps are used today, and our explainer on what a joint crutch does covers the small tip some people roll in.
Rolling papers today
Papers are still sold as thin, gummed sheets in booklets. What has changed is the material and the scrutiny. Papers now come in wood pulp, hemp, flax, rice and clear cellulose, and independent labs have started testing them for metals. Our guide to choosing rolling papers covers sizes, materials and what that testing found.
For the history of other smoking gear, our history of who invented the bong goes much further back, and our history of who invented the vape pen starts with a 1960s patent.
If you're looking for papers, cones or wraps, each store's menu shows what's in stock: Fresno, Orcutt, La Mesa and Chicago.
Sources and further reading
- Pablo Miranzo, Lis Gaibar and Miguel Ángel Valero, Hace un siglo el papel protagonista lo tenía Alcoi, El Salto, 2022
- Rizla, History
- Imperial Brands, Our history
- Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising, JOB
- Ville de Perpignan, Hôtel Pams visitor guide
- Zig-Zag, official website
