Revealing the hidden story of paper

Blog series Collection care

Author Camille Dekeyser, Conservation Team Leader, Qatar Project

If you hold a sheet of paper up to the light to look through, you may discover a hidden world: lines, cloudy patterns or perhaps even a watermark. Looking at paper in transmitted light can reveal a wealth of information about its manufacture and history. Modern machine-made paper generally appears evenly cloudy, while handmade laid paper shows chain lines, laid lines and, in many case, watermarks. Often described as papermaker’s signature, watermarks are designs created during the papermaking process by wires attached to the mould used to form each sheet. As shown in the images below, the paper fibres settle around these wires, leaving slightly thinner areas in the paper that become visible when held to the light.

For paper historians, every detail matters. The distance between the chain lines, the position of the watermark (and sometimes the countermark), and the design of the watermarks are many clues about where, when and how a sheet of paper was made. By studying and comparing these details, academics can identify the origins of documents and retrace parts of their journey from production to their present location, helping to verify authenticity, reconstruct historical networks of trade and communication, and better understand how documents were created, used and preserved over time.

A collaboration between conservators and Imaging Team at the British Library led to the creation of a series of digitised and traced watermarks from the India Office Records IOR/L/MAR/A collection.

I am delighted to announce that the images have joined the Bernstein project and can be searched on their database: Memory of Paper.

My sincere thanks go to Emanuel Wenger, from the Austrian Academy of Science (OeAW), for representing the Bernstein Project, uploading the images and making them widely available to researchers. By joining the Bernstein Portal, these watermarks become part of an international resource dedicated to the history and study of paper, bringing together watermark collections, bibliographic resources and research tools from institutions across Europe and beyond.

For more information about the project, see our previous blog posts:

• Paper express! A hand-made tale
• Making watermarks visible: a collaborative project between Conservation and Imaging
• Revealing watermarks – a remote collaboration between Conservation and Imaging