From www.ryomagazine.com : "For those of you who are old enough to remember the 60' &70's, a commonplace sight was to see folks rolling cigarettes (of all kinds) using a bamboo rolling mat. Now we get a few dozen e-mails each month from just such people who have been looking for bamboo rolling mats. Until recently we have not seen them and conveyed the information to our readers that they no longer exist, at least on a commercially viable scale. In fact they never were mass produced, major brand items. They usually could be found at fairs, festivals or swap meets and were generally hand-made by the person you bought them from or were obtained as generic imports and then individually labeled. Most were from 12" to 16" square and many folks who liked them substituted bamboo place mats found at import shops like Pier One or Cost Plus. These worked nearly as well, though in most cases, they were pretty big. There was only one actual "brand" I remember from those days with the name stamped on it but for the life of me I cannot remember that name and I believe it was still a regional (California) item (It might have been Bambu though). Well, for those of you who have asked, there is now a mass-produced, readily available rolling mat. HBI (Herbal Bar Industries, www.hbiinternational.com ) of Phoenix, Arizona, the largest distributor of rolling papers on the planet sent me a whole box of their new ZEN (yes ZEN again) rolling mats. They are much smaller than the ones I remember and are designed to be held in the hand rather than used on the ground or table like the ones of the past. In fact it took me awhile to figure out to use the thing in the my hand using a motion very similar to hand rolling. They are already popular here in Ashland and seem to attract an audience looking for a natural and space saving solution to hand rollers. They don't (for me) work as well as hand rollers and are only somewhat better for me than hand rolling (which I do little of anyway). However one of my customers at our now closed store came in one day and using this mat, proceeded to roll me some of the nicest, thinnest, most consistent sticks I had seen, even better than most of my hand rolling machine endeavors. So, with the proper practice and thus developed skill, they are no doubt useful. And they fold up and fit in any pocket, even the back pocket of your jeans and seem to be pretty impervious to damage even when sat on. Many people who hand-roll take a great deal of pride in their artistic dexterity and it is clearly a part of their enjoyment of smoking. These mats will create a whole new crowd of magicians who will dazzle and delight their friends with their skill with this handy little tool."

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