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I
Various radiographic and photographic processes for reproducing watermarks have in the past two decades made the identification of paper more precise than earlier researchers ever considered possible. But while those methods work well when a watermark is in fact present and when enough of it is visible to be identifiable, there exists no systematic way of describing and differentiating the vast quantities of paper without watermarks. That paper appears in many forms: it may be an entire unwatermarked sheet, or it may be only a single leaf—from a marked or unmarked sheet—used for a cancel, title page, errata list, plate, or other special section. Because a watermark is normally centered in one of the halves of a sheet of paper, 50% of the gatherings produced by half-sheet imposition in formats like the octavo usually have no watermark. On still other occasions watermarks are absent because a zealous binder has trimmed into oblivion a mark appearing at the edge of a leaf.
On the basis of my study of editions of Alexander Pope's Dunciad from 1728 through 1751, I should like to consider features which can be used to distinguish varieties of unmarked paper. Those methods work for watermarked sheets as well, with numerous advantages: they provide a way of describing the entire sheet, not just the part where the watermark appears; they permit identification of the paper when only a partial watermark is present; and they provide a means of recording paper details when watermark reproduction facilities are not available or their cost prohibitive. In the pages that follow I shall also suggest ways that these characteristics might be recorded and, by means of examples from The Dunciad, consider some of the applications of this information.
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