Bull's Head and Mermaid - The Bernstein Project - Österreichische ...

first wove papers in the Spechthausen paper mill. Friedrich
Schiller loved wove paper for the formulation of his letters
and manuscripts but also for his private print copies. Paper
with watermarks from Adrian Rogge’s paper mill ‘De
Walvis’ was used for the Musenalmanach from 1796. The
novel paper grade gained friends in Poland, too, whose
own production is documented for the first time around
1823.
The first-time use of such a wove paper is documented at
least by parts of the Latin edition of Vergil published in
1757 by the type founder and printer John Baskerville
(1706–1775) in Birmingham. Although Baskerville claimed
that this ‘wove paper’ was his invention and he was rightly
famous for his prints shining due to the hot pressing
method, it is assumed that James Whatman Senior
(1702–1759), England’s most important papermaker of the
18 th century, or his homonymous son (1741–1798) had
produced this paper. The English paper historian Richard
L. Hills commented to the development of the wove papers
of Whatman: “His wove paper, while being very high
quality, distinctly shows shadow zones caused by ribs under
the wire covering. Presumably the wire covering must
have been placed directly on top of the wooden frame and
the ribs of the papermaker’s mould without any backing
wires.” Neither the ripped paper nor the one without
ribs of the Vergil edition had been watermarked. In the
year 1759 Baskerville used for his print ‘Paradise regained’
a wove paper which didn’t show any shadow ranges.
The presumption that it was produced by James Whatman
Senior is supported by the fact that he verifiably delivered
the wove papers for the ‘Prolusions’ edition from 1759
and the ‘Aesop’ edition from 1761, both printed by
Baskerville. A subsequent break in the production of wove
paper gives according to Hills further evidence to the assumption
that the older James Whatman was the one who
had produced all those papers before he died on June 29 th ,
1759.
One observes different facts with respect to the watermarks:
“In wove paper the watermarks set themselves
apart very clearly, the pictures come into one’s own, the
impression is neither influenced by ribs nor by chain lines.
Paper without ribs co-exists at the same time and parallel
to tabbed paper; from a general point of view the innovation
did not prevail completely.”
Some paper mills completely dispensed with the production
of wove paper, some produced only such paper grades,
and others produced both kinds. The modified mould
technology created novel forms of watermarks, e.g. the
so-called Vollwasserzeichen (Ill. 12). No contour shapes
formed by bent wire but complete letters cut from metal
sheets and fixed on the woven sieve were used instead.
Full-area, light-shaded watermarks are generated by this
approach. Additionally, so-called ‘dark watermarks’ as well
as ‘light-and-dark watermarks’ could be made in wove as
well as in normal paper using another improvement of the
watermark technology starting from the middle of the 18 th
century (e.g. 1787 by Johann Gottlieb Ebart in Spechthausen).
Thus, paper got many new faces but one of the
main problems blocking further developments, viz lack of
raw materials, persisted.
Ill. 12: Watermark from a wove paper of the Mindelheim paper
mill. The lettering ‘LUDWIG. I. KOENIG VON. BAIERN’ is done in
the form of a so-called ‘Vollwasserzeichen’. Papermaker Joseph
Hundegger (1835)
From Schäffer to Keller – the Search for
Alternative Paper Raw Materials to Counter the
Lack of Resources
Complaints about the lack of raw materials can be traced
back nearly to the beginning of European papermaking.
The reason for the small-scale production structure in papermaking
until the decline of the manual paper making
may be caused not in the last place by the difficult raw material
supply. Rags being not directly available from nature
were a secondary raw material. That means they were at
disposal only to a limited extent. At the beginning of the
19 th century one reckoned with an approximate rag crop of
three pounds per inhabitant and year. In the course of time
their quality was subject to considerable changes. The use
of pure linen fabric was declining, blended fabrics like barracan
(linen as chaining thread and cotton as filling thread)
and increasingly pure cotton fabrics took over which, with
the production means of the time, could be processed to
paper by far worse than linen or hemp fibres. Besides, each
paper mill was eager to get from the authority the privilege
for collecting rags within a specific territory in which no
other paper maker was allowed to send his ragman on acquisition
tour. So it was inevitable that the local population
living in those assigned districts didn’t get better prices for
the sale of rags. So it does not astonish that in boarder districts
and especially the better rags which were worth the
transport expenses found their way to the nearby or distant
foreign countries despite all kinds of prohibitions and smuggle
flourished. Under such circumstances it was obvious
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