Les Filigranes/Watermarks

On display here is a watermark and its identifier side by side. On the right the watermark on a letter written by King Ferdinand of Castile and Aragon and on the left its match in Charles Briquet’s Les Filigranes. Briquet’s information tells us that the paper was made in a mill in Perpignan, France just north of the Spanish border around 1505. The four volume reference set first published in 1907 identifies over 16,000 watermarks from European papers during the years 1282-1600.

The letter is the oldest signed manuscript in the James G. Stahlman Autograph Collection.