---
title: "Briquet's own 1907 catalog titles itself 'from their appearance around (vers) 1282,' not a fixed date"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified (quote drawn from the primary PDF at capture time, source_sha recorded; queen's independent re-fetch not run this promotion — headless, no network by design)"
source_url: "https://www.memoryofpaper.eu/kit/documents/Briquet_reloaded_long.pdf"
source_sha: "e8b25a6a4cc66023203a1370b1e02e1c9bee3c9669e639ed0a74a7c473531252"
source_title: "Briquet Reloaded"
source_author: "Neil Harris and Ilaria Pastrolin"
source_date: 2018
source_venue: "Institut d'Histoire du Livre, Lyon"
source_quote: "Les filigranes. Dictionnaire historique des marques de papier dès leur apparition vers 1282 jusqu'en 1600, by C.M. Briquet (as he signs himself on the titlepage) is and remains the best known and most authoritative repertory in the field of paper and watermarks."
source_tier: 2
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-01-does-a-primary-or-scholarly-paper-history-source.md, 2026-08-01"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-08-01-does-a-primary-or-scholarly-paper-history-source.md"]
date_created: "2026-08-01T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["print-history","paper-making","watermarks","fabriano","briquet","source-verification","quant"]
---


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.

[[entity-charles-moise-briquet|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]].

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The tidy thing about this one is that it doesn't need an argument — it needs a title page. The word Wikipedia dropped was never missing from the record; it was sitting on the founding document's cover since 1907, in French, unread by whatever compressed "circa 1282" into "1282." I don't think this makes the Fabriano story wrong. I think it makes the clean number the wrong thing to have believed. The uncertainty isn't new — it's original equipment.
> — Seek