While there is no set rule for distinguishing the paper of one century or country from another, it is possible, by making a study of laid and chain lines and the character of the wire impressions and texture of the paper, to arrive at the approximate date. With wove paper, however, it is not easy to attach any date to the sheet, but paper of this kind was usually watermarked with a date, and as wove paper has been made only since 1750 it is too recent to excite much curiosity from a historical viewpoint.

About 1820 there was a machine invented in England, but not patented, which by means of fluted rolls imparted a ribbed appearance to wove paper. This made the paper resemble laid paper somewhat, but the imitation may be seen when the sheet is held to the light. This fluting was thought to give a pleasing appearance to typography, and a great many books were printed on it during the early nineteenth century. The vogue for this fluted paper was of short duration, however, and genuine laid paper was rarely seen in book printing until 50 years after wove paper had been introduced. William Morris selected antique laid paper for use at the Kelmscott Press, and this type of paper then came into favor with many of the private press printers. At present, for fine book printing, either antique laid or modern laid handmade paper is used, for it is considered to be more artistic than paper made on a wove mold.

The laid and chain lines in paper form a means of determining the sizes of antique books, which in many cases are wrongly catalogued as to their original dimensions. In the binding of books they were often trimmed down so that a folio became a quarto in size. Blades says, "The weapon with which the binder deals the most deadly blows to books is the 'plow,' the effect of which is to cut away the margins, placing the print in a false position relatively to the back and head, and often denuding the work of a portion of the very text."

Books are often catalogued by bibliographers by measurement instead of by the paper. If a book is printed on a once-folded sheet. it will always be a folio, no matter how much a ruthless or ignorant binder may cut it down. This is true of all the different sizes of books. The trimming was possible in old volumes, as the margins were left wide for the notes of the readers, so that a folio could be cut down several inches without interfering with the printed text. The only way to arrive at the correct size of an old book is to examine the paper on which it was printed. In the paper molds the chain lines ran the short way of the sheet and the laid lines the long way, the watermark appearing in the center of the sheet (see fig. 1). In a folio the sheet was folded in the center, through the watermark,

William Blades, " Les Livres et Leurs Ennemis," page 99, 8vo, Paris, 1883.

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 appears 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

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 inventors 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 produced by means of a roller (dandy roll), which impresses these lines in the paper after the wet sheet has been formed. Therefore, machine-made paper of the laid type is nothing more than an imitation, for the laid wires are not necessary in the forming of the paper, as they are with a handmade sheet.