At first glance you might wonder if these two moulds are actually a pair. One is wove and one is laid and they have completely different watermarks. However not only does a stamp in the brass indicate they were made by T J Marshall (but no date) but also both moulds were stamped B7698 so they are definitely a pair.
The wove mould features two small light and shade watermarks.
This little bird is a gem featuring both light and shade and line watermarking. It looks to be a dove but rather than holding an olive branch in its beak it has a ring and seems to be perched on a branch. So maybe it's a crow which suggests perhaps Aesop but I could not, in a quick search, find a fable involving a ring as well. The Dove's Press symbol had two doves facing each other.
The other watermark in the wove mould is CP - could this be Curwen Press?
The second mould is double faced laid. The cover wire is shinier than the wove cover which suggests that perhaps a new cover was fitted to this mould; if so why not to the first mould?
In contrast to the wove watermarks, this one is straightforward, or nearly. In 1975 we made two batches of paper watermarked with Jasper Johns' signature. The watermark on this 341 x 424 mm sheet was complemented by the same watermark in wove sheets 210 x 148 mm. My understanding was that they were both to be used in a suite of 11 etchings. The small sheets each had an image of the number 0 to 9 whilst the large sheet had all ten numbers in a grid. You can see the ten small images at Joseph K Leven Fine Art but I have not found the larger one and wonder if it was ever made. I have quite a lot of the blank small sheets in the archives, complete with the water mark which was later removed as it was fitted to our laboratory mould M298 used for making trial sheets of paper for colour matching.
Finally this image shows how the sheet size had been reduced by fastening small slips of wood to the deckle.
© Copyright Simon Barcham Green 2011. Not to be copied or reproduced without written permission
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