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

Ill. 9: IBE 3513.01,
Folder 1: images of the entire A5 format sheets, with library, fol.nr,
mL (mark left), mR (mark right), number of chain lines from the left
or the right side of the incunable sheet.
WILC
The database “Watermarks in Incunabula in the Low Countries”
(WILC) contains 16,000 watermarks (Ill. 7, 8) from almost
all of the 2,000 incunabula that were printed in the
Netherlands in the 15 th century. The database was designed
and developed by Gerard van Thienen, the former curator
of incunabula at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the National
Library of the Netherlands in The Hague. After his retirement,
work on the WILC has been carried on by his successor,
Marieke van Delft.
The database was developed to enable the dating of the
circa 1,200 undated incunabula of the museum’s collection.
In addition to an analysis of an incunabulum’s type and other
bibliographic means, the paper of these incunabula offers
possibilities of restricting the probable date a work was
published to a number of years instead of a number of
decades.
Until the second half of the 20 th century, the identification
of paper was difficult because watermark reproduction
through the common method of tracing was too imprecise.
Tracing has now finally been replaced by new methods such
as photography, beta radiography, Dylux, low-voltage X-radiation
(as in WM I 00152), rubbings (as in WM I 00259)
and electron radiography. The last method particularly – a
special technique using X-rays – gives very good results.
Over the last fifteen years, images of the watermarks in incunabula
from all over the world have been made in this
manner. Although most of the 16,000 images in the WILC
have been made by rubbings, images of the watermarks of
94
the hundred dated folios owned by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek,
numbering about 4,300, have been made by means
of electron radiography.
The descriptions of the images include all the information
that is essential for research on paper: a short, standardized
description of the watermark, the position of the watermark
in the sheet and the distance between the chain lines,
the IPH classification and references to the most important
published sources, such as Piccard and Briquet. Moreover,
all identical watermarks have been brought together in
groups. The description of the watermarks is primarily
based on the “English Typological Index” in Briquet (1968).
The database is available on the Internet (www.kb.nl/watermark)
and queries can be made freely, using a simple or
advanced search. A search result provides an image combined
with the watermark’s description. Visual navigation is
possible through the descriptions of the motifs. Metadata
on the incunabulum under consideration are also included,
such as author, title and printing location. A link to the Incunabula
Short Title Catalogue in the British Library
(http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/istc) is also provided.
WIES – Watermarks in Incunabula
printed in España
M.v.D. (M.v.D. / C. P.-K.)
The WIES collection (http://www.ksbm.oeaw.ac.at/wies/) (Ill.
9, 10) contains nearly 6,000 images of rubbings of watermarks
in incunabula printed in Spain. Thanks to the hospitality
of the Austrian Kommission für Schrift- und Buchwesen
des Mittelalters and Alois Haidinger, it has been made
possible to present this sample of watermarks, selected
from the 9,100 rubbings that have been made from copies
of more than 900 editions of the total of 1,000 incunabula
printed in 15 th century Spain.
The research was started in 2000, and more than one hundred
libraries have been visited, mainly in Spain but also in
the USA (New York Hispanic Society and others), Portugal,
Belgium, and the Netherlands, as well as in London, Munich,
Paris, St. Petersburg, Vienna, and elsewhere.
In this provisional presentation – put online in January
2007 with 2,800 records – the images are arranged not by
watermark motif but by bibliographical number, mostly the
IBE (Catálogo general de incunables en Bibliotecas Españolas)
or the HBI (Haebler, Bibliografia Iberica) numbers, or a
few other bibliographical reference works, including BMC X
and Goff.
All of the watermarks found in the investigated editions
have been scanned.
Author, title, imprint and other short-title data can be
found in the printed reference books (HBI, IBE, etc.) but also
in the international database of incunabula of the British
Library: http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/istc
In September 2008, the Council of the Bibliographical Society,
London, approved support for the completion of a
database of watermarks in Spanish incunabula: WIES. A
first step has been 3,100 scans being made at Multiscan, a
firm based in the Dutch village of Urk, which will be added
to the 2,800 already presented in 2007.