who had been experimenting with type faces of 

 a Hwhtcr and more dehcatc design, had been dissat- 

 isfied with the uneven surface of laid paper. Possibly 

 he saw examples of the Chinese wallpaper on wove 

 stock, made from a cloth mesh, which was a staple 

 of the trade with the Orient. Hunter " describes 

 the new mould: 



The wove covering was made of fine brass screening 

 and received its name because it was woven on a loom 

 in about the same manner as clotli. It left in the paper an 

 indistinct impression resembling a fabric. Baskcrville had 

 been in the japanning and metal-woriiing trades before 

 becoming a printer, so that he was naturally familiar witli 

 this material, metal screening having been used in England 

 for other purposes before it was put to use as a material 

 upon which to mould sheets of paper. 



The first book printed in Europe on wove paper 

 unquestionably was the I^atin edition of Virgil 

 produced by Baskcrville in 1757. This was, however, 

 partly on laid also. The actual paper was made in 

 James Whatman's mill in .Maidstone, Kent, on the 

 banks of the river Lcn, where paper had been made 

 since the 17th century. Whatman, who became sole 

 owner of the mill in 1740, specialized in fine white 

 paper of the highest quality. But while the book at- 

 tracted considerable attention it did not immediately 

 divert the demand for laid paper, since it was looked 

 on more as an oddity than as a serious achievement. 

 Baskcrville was strictly an artist: he took unlimited 

 time and pains, he had no regard for the prevailing 

 market, and he produced sporadically; also, he was 

 harshly criticized and even derided for his strange 

 formats."* With such a reputation for impracticality 

 the printer's influence was negligible during his life- 

 time although, of course, it was widely felt later. 



About 1777 the French became acquainted with 

 wove paper, which Franklin brought to Paris for exhi- 

 bition. In 1779, according to Hunter,'" M. Didot 

 the famous printer, "having seen the papier lelin that 

 Baskcrville u.sed, addressed a letter to M. Johannot of 

 Annonay, a skilled papermaker, asking him to en- 

 deavour to duplicate the smooth and even surface of 

 this new paper. Johannot was successful in his cx- 



" Hunter, op. cil. (footnote 15), p. 215. 



" R. Straus and R. K. Dent, John Baskcrville, Cambridge, 

 1907. On page 19 the authors include a letter to Baskcrville 

 from Benjamin Franklin, written in 1760 in a jocular tone, 

 which notes that he overheard a friend saying that Baskervillc's 

 types would be "the means of blinding all tlie Readers in the 

 Nation owing to the thin and narrow strokes of the letters." 



'* Hunter, op. cit. (footnote 15), p. 219. 



Figure 7. — Wood Engr.aving by 

 Thomas Bewick, "The Man and the 

 Flea," for Fables, hy ihe late Mr. Gay, 

 \11^. (Actual size.) Note how the 

 closely worked lines of the sky and 

 water have blurred in priming on laid 

 paper. The pale vertical streak is 

 caused by the laid mould. 



periments, and for his work in this field he was in 

 1781 awarded a gold medal by Louis X\'l." 



\Vo\e paper was so slow to come into use that Jen- 

 kins gi\es the date 1788 for its first appearance in hook 

 isriniing."" While he missed a few examples, notably 

 by Baskcrville, it is certain that few books with wo\c 

 paper were published before 1790. But after that 

 date its manufactiue increased with such rapidity 

 that by 1805 it had supplanted laid paper for many 

 printing purposes. 



The reasons for this gap between the introduction 

 and the acceptance of the new paper are not clear; the 

 inertia of tradition as well as the ])rol)able hinher cost 

 no doubt played a part, and we may assuiuc that early 

 wove paper had imperfections and other drawbacks 

 serious enough to cause printers to prefer the older 

 material. 



Bewick's early work was printed on laid paper. F p 

 to 1784 he had worked in a desultory fashion on wood, 

 much of his time being occupied with seal cuttinu; be- 

 cause there was still no real demand lor wood en- 

 graving. In Gay's Fables, published in 1779, the cuts 

 printed .so poorly on the laid paper (.see fig. 7) that 

 Dobson ■' was moved to say: 



Generally speaking, the printing of all these cuts, even 

 in the earlier editions (and it is absolutely useless to consult 



-"Rhys Jenkins, "Early papcrmaking in England, 1495- 

 1788," Lihrmy Association Record, London, 1900-1902, vol. 2, 

 nos. 9 and 1 1 ; vol. 3, no. 5; vol. 4, nos. 3 and 4. 



-' Dobson, op. cil. (footnote 8), p. 56. 



194 



BULLETIN 218: CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE MUSEUM OF HISTORY .\ND TECHNOLOGY 



