A Gentle Madness

I promised a post about the production of paper and its usefulness in bibliography. Here is a description, lifted from a draft of my thesis:

Before the advent of machinery in the 1800s, paper was a handmade object created by dipping a mould into a vat of pulp, known as stuff. The mould consists of an outer wooden frame with inner supporting ribs, running vertically along the shorter end of the mould. A fine wire mesh covers the mould, allowing water to drain out when removed from the vat of stuff. The mould has two identifiable sets of wires—wirelines, a fine mesh of thin wires that run horizontally across the length of the mould, and chainlines, thicker wires that tie the supporting ribs to the mould. [Try googling “paper mould” in google image search] When handmade paper is held up to light, the imprints of these wires are easily discernible. For purposes of bibliographic research, since the mould itself is a handmade object—no two are exactly alike—the ribs for each mould will bear a unique spacing pattern. Since this pattern is reflected in the chainline imprint on the paper, it is possible to measure the spaces between the chainlines in order to create a “fingerprint” for each mould. Moreover, because many moulds of the era bore a sewn-on wire design, creating a watermark, the combination of chainline spaces and watermark form a highly accurate description of any given mould. When describing paper, however, researchers must keep in mind Allan Stevenson’s remark: “Watermarks are twins.” The production of paper in the hand-press period was a two-man process involving a set of moulds. The vatman would dip the first mould into the stuff, give the mould a shake to lock the fibers, and pass the mould to the koucher, who would hand a second mould to the vatman. While the vatman was dipping the mould, the koucher would roll the paper off the mould using a sheet of felt, preparing the mould to be used again. In any given day, a paper-making team would be able to produce 2000 sheets of paper, each mould being dipped around 1000 times. Such constant strain on the moulds led to short lives—rarely more than a year; the sewn-on wires for the watermarks lasted six months (from Gaskell’s A New Introduction to Bibliography). Important to the description and identification of paper, then, is the idea that two moulds were in use to form one stock of paper—each sheet of paper has a twin. By looking at multiple copies of a work, it is possible to create a composite model for each mould and to accurately pair one mould with its twin.

Much of my thesis work included traveling to libraries that held copies of Returne in order to count the chainlines in the paper of each copy. The work itself sounds about as dry as its description; however, it proved especially useful in the case of Returne, as it demonstrated a shared paper stock between the first and second editions.