In Allan Stevenson's 1959 Public Lecture on Books and Bibliography at the University of Kansas, he characterizes the study of paper in general and of watermarks specifically as having "hardly more than begun," noting that "most of the assumptions and most of the watermark books of the past are inadequate." Stevenson during his career contributed a great deal to the advancement of watermark studies, developing numerous procedures and demonstrating them to great effect. Yet more than 30 years later, John Bidwell described Stevenson's methods as encumbered with "expensive and unwieldy equipment," with the result that "Only a few have mastered this method, and none, to my knowledge, has relied on it extensively except for the study of incunabula."
With the introduction of digital technology into humanistic scholarship have come rapid advances in many previously slow-moving fields, including the bibliographical study of early printed books. This paper outlines the development of procedures and practices in computer-aided analysis of watermarks, then details a practical example of these procedures as applied to an investigation of the seventeenth-century printing trade in London.
It begins by wedding existing bibliographical practices with emerging technology to overcome Bidwell's expense and convenience barrier. Surveying the currently available methods of watermark reproduction, it shows how inexpensive, powerful and widely available digital technology can be used to compensate for the shortcomings of the Dylux facsimiles. While inexpensive and to some degree portable, these methods often produce watermark images obscured by the types on the page. However, digital enhancement can now markedly increase the legibility of the watermark image by reducing type clutter to a manageable background noise. In addition it explores the potential use of different types of digital cameras in directly reproducing back-lit watermarks.
Next, the paper employs data collected through these digital techniques to analyze a three-year period in the production history of the printing shop of William Stansby, London Stationer. The evidential foundation of the analysis derives from a detailed physical examination of at least one copy of every work known to have been printed by Stansby from 1615 through 1617 (approximately 2200 edition sheets). In addition these diverse data have been correlated with an in-depth bibliographical analysis of the printing of one volume, Ben Jonson Folio Workes of 1616, itself based on a machine collation of 50 copies and paper evidence from 65 copies of the Folio. Using this rich collection of bibliographical data the study constructs a production schedule for Stansby's shop, placing into the larger three-year framework each work produced at Cross Keys. It also examines physical evidence which points to common occurrences of shared printing between Stansby and fellow Stationers, and to regular work patterns adopted by laborers within the shop.
Finally, the paper demonstrates an on-line catalogue of watermarked paper used by Stansby during the 1615-1617 production period. To create this digital resource, the watermark images were reproduced from source volumes located in rare book libraries using beta-radiography and Dylux proofing paper, and digitized on a Hewlett Packard flatbed scanner. The images were then enhanced with the XV manipulation tool on a IBM RS/6000 running XWindows. Each image taken from the Stansby books has been bibliographically described, each catalogue entry encoded using TEI-compliant SGML, and the entire database cross-linked to an enumerative bibliography of Stansby's printing output from 1607-1620, also SGML-encoded. The database of images and descriptions then has been indexed using the Open Text Corporation's Pat software to furnish sophisticated searching capabilities. In order to provide wider scholarly access the catalogue is linked to the World Wide Web, with perl scripts providing real-time conversion of SGML to HTML for the searchable database. The catalogue, still in progress, can be examined by clicking here:
This paper derives its impulse and focus from a larger analytical study of the publishing history of Ben Jonson's folio Workes of 1616. The on-line catalogue was devised at the University of Virginia's Electronic Text Center, and Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, and the entire project funded in part by the Bibliographical Society of America, the Huntington Library, and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities.