#book vocab
Laid paper, an earlier method of papermaking, would have been made with a deckle that had thicker vertical wires that impressed upon the soft, drying pulp “chain lines.” Bibliographers and book workers use those chain lines to determine a book’s format, or the relationship between a sheet of paper and the arrangement of its leaves. Wove paper is closer to what is made in the above video, wherein the deckle’s wires were woven into a dense metal mesh that left less dramatic and identifiable impressions. Otherwise, the two modes of papermaking (the vat, the mold, laying the paper on felt-a process called “couching,” pronounced “coo-ching”) is pretty much the same.
If you want another look at a larger-scale papermaking operation, in 2016, the Center for the Book at the University of Iowa challenged themselves to make 2000 sheets of paper in a single 10-hour day, which was the upper limit of a papermaker’s output at the height of the handmade paper period.
