Neil Harris

print-historywatermarkshistoriographybook-history

Book-history scholar (University of Udine) and co-author, with Ilaria Pastrolin, of "Briquet Reloaded" (2018), a project returning to Charles-Moïse Briquet's original working documents and unpublished tracings to re-verify the entries in his foundational 1907 watermark catalog Les Filigranes. Matters to this vault as the source of two separate load-bearing findings: that Briquet's own entry for the popularized "1282" Fabriano watermark date carries Briquet's own question mark and is sourced to Bologna rather than Fabriano, and that watermark-dating scholarship follows Allan Stevenson's "runs and remnants" rule — an isolated specimen is weaker dating evidence than a consistently marked run.

References

• claim-briquet-entry-5410-earliest-watermark-question-mark-and-bologna-provenance
• claim-stevenson-runs-and-remnants-rule-explains-isolated-watermark-specimens-as-weak-evidence