LAID AND WOVE HUNTER. 



593 



and the chain lines still ran up and down. No matter how the book 

 has been trimmed, it is always possible by this means to see that it 

 was originally a folio. In a quarto the paper is again folded, so the 

 chain lines run across the sheet, and a section of the watermark ap- 

 pears in the upper left corner of the sheet. With an octavo the 

 chain lines run up and down, as in a folio. 



As the earliest paper was made on crudely formed molds covered 

 with a loosely woven cloth, we must accept the wove sheet as the 

 original type of paper. The laid mold came into use a few centuries 

 later, and as it was the first kind of mold from which a sheet of paper 

 could be taken while wet, this invention must be considered the first 

 real step in paper making, and it was from this original Persian laid 

 mold that the art of paper making has developed. After the laid 

 bamboo mold came the laid wire mold — first fabricated with iron 

 wire and in later 'years with brass, the material used at present for 



cci-uvo 



Fig. 1. — By examining the laid and chain lines in old books It is possible to detect 

 whether a volume has been reduced in size by trimming the margins. 



both laid and wove molds. Then in the eighteenth century the woven 

 type of mold was reinvented, but instead of using the woven cloth 

 of the Chinese, from which a sheet could not be taken while wet, 

 woven wire was used, which furnished a firm and rigid surface. At 

 the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth cen- 

 turies came inventions for making paper by machine. These in- 

 ventors used the original idea of the transfer, or Persian bamboo 

 mold, only in the case of the machine the mold was continuous and 

 formed the paper not in single sheets, as the hand mold, but in any 

 desired length. 



In modern machine-made paper the laid and chain lines are pro- 

 duced by means of a roller (dandy roll), which impresses these lines 

 in the paper after the wet sheet has been formed. Therefore, ma- 

 chine-made paper of the laid type is nothing more than an imita- 

 tion, for the laid wires are not necessary in the forming of the paper, 

 as thev are with a handmade sheet. 



