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

Ill. Abb. 2: Piccard’s Findbücher (watermark registers) (selection)
14 th century. He realized that “if one ... collects rare paper
marks, this has the effect of letting us determine the age,
to a high degree of certainty, of documents or manuscripts
written on paper with this or that mark” (p. 138).
Forty years later, the Benedictine Gottfried Werl of Göttweig
Abbey included a collection of 306 watermark types
at the beginning of his catalogue of the manuscripts of
Göttweig (V 1). A list of 368 watermarks from the 14 th century,
also as an aid for dating, was published in 1897 by
Friedrich Keinz, collected from the manuscripts in the Bayerische
Staatsbibliothek (V 3).
In the second half of the 19 th century, a number of collections
were published, some quite extensive and in most cases
with true to scale drawings. In this connection must be mentioned
above all the extensive collections of Etienne Midoux
and Auguste Matton, as well as of Franciszek Piekosiñski,
Nikolai Petrovich Likhachev (V 5) and Paul Heitz. Unsurpassed
by all of these collections was, however, the four-volume compendium
“Les Filigranes” (Ill. 10) by Charles-Moïse Briquet (V
4), which includes 16,112 reproductions of watermarks from
the period between 1282 and 1600 (Ill. 10).
The first large watermark collection published after Briquet
that can be considered a valuable supplement to his
work was published in 1957 by Wladimir A. Mosin and Seid
M. Tralji[u22], entitled “Filigranes des XIII e et XlV e ss”. Between
1961 und 1997, Gerhard Piccard (V 10), to whom
the study of watermarks owes its standing today as a historical
field in its own right, published seventeen so-called
“Findbücher” (Ill. 11) named by the motifs of the printed
watermarks, which include reproductions of 4,540 watermark
types and 44,497 individual watermarks (Ill. 11).
Besides to Piccard’s Findbücher, in the past few decades a
series of smaller collections have also been published. Of
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note can be mentioned the collection of watermarks from
Greek manuscripts by Dieter Harlfinger, the catalogue of
watermarks in Hebrew manuscripts to 1450 in France and
Israel by Monique Zerdoun Bat-Yehouda, as well as the inventory
of the watermarks in the manuscripts of the Royal
Library Albert I in Brussels by Martin Wittek. David Woodward
has published a monograph devoted to the watermarks
in printed Italian maps of the years 1540 to 1600. Also
notable is the “Mélanges archéographiques” (Belgrad),
which since 1991 has been publishing the watermarks of
southeast European manuscripts.
Just as in the collections published two hundred years
ago, today’s publications depict the watermarks in outlines
that are more or less accurate. Although far superior to older
methods (but very expensive), the method of photographing
watermarks by radiographic means was nevertheless
only used for the collections of Woodward and Zerdoun.
Despite the Findbücher of Piccard and the large internet collections
Piccard-Online, WILC and WZMA (cf. chap. VI) that
have come into being in the last years, the old published collections
have not outlived their usefulness. They still provide
valuable information, especially about the time span that relatively
uncommon early watermarks were in use.
Published collections of watermarks in paper of the
Middle Ages and early modern period (selected):
Charles-Moïse Briquet: Les Filigranes. Dictionnaire historique des
marques du papier dès leurs apparition vers jusqu’en 1600, 4 Vol.
Paris etc. 1907, 2. Aufl. Leipzig 1923. – C.-M. Briquet, Les Filigranes.
The New Briquet, Jubilee Edition. Ed. Allan Stevenson, 4
Vol., Amsterdam 1968.