[BOOK ARTS - PAPERMAKING]. Bifolium sheet bearing watermark portrait of Dard Hunter and his name

Paris: Perrigot-Masure, 1924. Very good. Folio (290 x 215 mm / 8.5" x 11.5"). An original sheet of mould-made wove paper, folded once to create a bifolium, edges untrimmed. Portrait of Dard Hunter as a young man expressed as a watermark on the right half of the sheet, his name in the Viennese lettering style on the right (lightly washed to remove former tide-mark, now almost invisible; short tear along fold measures less than 1cm for which SEE IMAGES). EXTRAORDINARILY SOFT AND LUMINOUS LIGHT-AND-SHADE / CHIAROSCURO WATERMARK, DEPICTING A PROFILE PORTRAIT OF THE GREATEST PAPER HISTORIAN OF ALL TIME, DARD HUNTER, TOGETHER WITH HIS NAME IN THE ARTS & CRAFTS STYLE. THE CHIAROSCURO WATERMARK WAS INVENTED BY W.H. SMITH IN 1848 TO THWART COUNTERFEITERS. CREATED CA. 1922, THE PRESENT SPECIMEN POSITIVELY GLOWS AND IS EASILY ONE OF THE FINEST WE HAVE EVER SEEN. IN THIS SINGLE SHEET FORMAT IT IS EASILY HANDLED AND AS SUCH IS A PERFECT TOOL FOR CLASSROOM INSTRUCTION.

This remarkable bifolium demonstrates how the paper fibers run from thick to thin in a shaded fashion, producing an image with many graduated shades of black and gray. This image is derived from variations in thinness or thickness of the paper itself. The design for the mould is rendered from 2- to 3-D, first by tracing the sketch onto a thin slab of semi-translucent wax, then slowly and gently scraping out the wax using precision carving tools.

For the present watermark, the mould was made by W. Green, Son and Waite in England. This was rendered from a wax portrait by Paul Couvez, modeled after the well-known photography of Hunter by Clara Johnson. It is known that Hunter ordered seven reams from the Parisian papermaker, Perrigot-Masure in 1922, and a further nine reams later in 1924. Our specimen is folded once and measures 8.5" x 11.5" (not 11") and the edges are untrimmed. While it may have been intended for his own stationery, examples were also inserted into copies of Hunter's Old Papermaking, and for the prospectus of The Literature of Papermaking.

Dard Hunter (1883-1966) was a truly gifted American artist, craftsman, and paper historian. He was leader in the American Arts & Crafts movement and almost single-handedly revived the art of handmade paper making. His knowledge and experience led him to write some of the most comprehensive histories of papermaking (Western and Eastern).

Stone & Dugal, Dard Hunter Watermarks, pl. 26.