Although paper, as we know it, dates back to the first century A.D., its mechanical characterisation only began in the second half of the twentieth century, with the seminal work of Cox. This macroscopically homogeneous, flat and common material hides an intricate network of fibres with a three-dimensional orientation. It is by glimpsing at the fibre network and by providing experimental evidences through a standard testing campaign that we propose a bidimensional nonlocal model that naturally accounts for the presence of the fibres. By doing so, the mechanical response in the elastic regime has been reproduced using a concise reformulation of elasticity known as bond-based peridynamics.