Watermarks and the Determination of Format in British Paper, 1794- circa 1830

Watermarks and the Determination of Format in British Paper, 1794-Circa 1830

My concern here is with British paper produced in what may be described as a `transitional' period, extending from 1794 to about 1830. That concern has been stimulated by the recent article by G. Thomas Tanselle, `The concept of format', ¹ and it is an interest in the relationship between the characteristics of various papers and the format of volumes in which they appear that underlies my observations.

For the bibliographer there are two major developments in the production of paper in Britain in the period under consideration which are of immediate relevance. One is the change, resulting from legislation which came into force in 1794, in the location of watermarks within the traditional hand-held mould. The other is the transition from hand-made paper (a process by which paper is produced, one sheet at a time, from hand-held moulds dipped into vats of stuff in suspension in tepid water) to machine-made (a process by which paper is produced by machine in a continuous web, to be cut into sheets of the required size at some subsequent stage).

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By the beginning of the 1790s much British paper (still all hand-made) was being produced in wove moulds, which had been gradually supplanting laid moulds from the late 1750s. Wove paper—made, it is assumed, by James Whatman snr.—appears to have been used for the first time in a British publication, John Baskerville's edition of Virgil's Bucolica, Georgica et Æneis, published in 1757 though the paper itself was presumably available as early as 1754. ² The use of wove paper had become the norm by the end of the century, even if the demand for laid paper was never to be eclipsed entirely. Not only were moulds increasingly wove; there was a tendency towards the use of moulds without watermarks. At all periods a certain proportion of hand-made paper—both laid and wove, and not always paper of the poorest quality—was produced without watermarks; for volumes printed on wove paper without watermarks it may therefore be impossible to determine their format, given the lack also of chain lines and especially in the likely absence of such alternative determinants as deckle/cut edges, point holes, press figures or sheet numbers.

The dilemma for the modern bibliographer is, however, largely resolved by the paper-makers' adherence to the provisions of `An Act for repealing the duties on paper, pasteboard, millboard, scaleboard, and glazed paper; and for granting other duties in lieu thereof, (34 George III, c.20), which came into effect 5 April 1794. Among other things, it provided that British-made paper used for writing, drawing and printing (`first class' paper) was to be taxed at the rate of 2½d. per lb. For present purposes the key provision of the Act was that printed books—whether bound or unbound—were, on export, eligible for a drawback (a refund of part of the duty already paid) amounting to 2d. per lb., with the proviso that `any such printed books . . . shall have visible in the substance thereof a mark commonly called a Water Mark, of a date of the present year of our Lord in the following figures 1794, or in a like manner of some subsequent year of our Lord.' ³

The `or' in this provision of the Act of 1794 is ambiguous, with the result, it is sometimes maintained, either that some paper-makers misunderstood the requirement to use the current year or that it allowed them to continue using moulds dated `1794', thus saving themselves the bother of changing the date in their moulds at the beginning of the new year. ⁴ Indeed, Thomas Balston notes of the Whatman mills, the largest and most highly regarded paper-making concern in the country, that

The watermark `J. Whatman, 1794' is found in so many books and letters...