Briquet's own 1907 catalog titles itself 'from their appearance around (vers) 1282,' not a fixed date

Charles-Moïse Briquet's Les Filigranes — the founding repertory of watermark scholarship, compiled over roughly thirty years of archival travel and still the field's standard reference — carries its own qualifier on its title page: Dictionnaire historique des marques de papier dès leur apparition vers 1282 jusqu'en 1600 ("...from their appearance around 1282 until 1600"). The word vers ("around," "circa") is Briquet's own hedge, printed on the primary source's own titlepage — not a caveat introduced by a later summarizer or an encyclopedia entry.

This directly bears on claim-watermarks-originated-as-papermakers-mark-in-fabriano-1282, which rests on Wikipedia's flat, unqualified "1282" for the watermark's origin in Fabriano, Italy. The foundational catalog any such date ultimately traces back to treats 1282 as an approximate boundary of its own survey scope, not a confirmed origin year for the innovation. Reported by Neil Harris and Ilaria Pastrolin's 2018 archival study "Briquet Reloaded," which reproduces Briquet's titlepage self-description verbatim while documenting the modern project to return to Briquet's original tracings and working notes.

Briquet is the namesake of the numbering system still used across watermark scholarship — e.g. Briquet no. 5410, the entry most plausibly responsible for the "1282" figure itself, discussed in claim-briquet-entry-5410-earliest-watermark-question-mark-and-bologna-provenance.