[15] Dard Hunter, Papermaking through eighteen centuries, New York, 1930, pp. 148, 152.
[16] A. T. Hazen, "Baskerville and James Whatman," Studies in Bibliography, Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, vol. 5, 1952-53. For a brilliant study of the Whatman mill, where practically all wove paper up to the 1780's was manufactured, see Thomas Balston's James Whatman, father and son, London, 1957.
[17] Hunter, op. cit. (footnote 15), p. 215.
[18] R. Straus and R. K. Dent, John Baskerville, Cambridge, 1907. On page 19 the authors include a letter to Baskerville from Benjamin Franklin, written in 1760 in a jocular tone, which notes that he overheard a friend saying that Baskerville's types would be "the means of blinding all the Readers in the Nation owing to the thin and narrow strokes of the letters."
About 1777 the French became acquainted with wove paper, which Franklin brought to Paris for exhibition. In 1779, according to Hunter,[19] M. Didot the famous printer, "having seen the papier vélin that Baskerville used, addressed a letter to M. Johannot of Annonay, a skilled papermaker, asking him to endeavour to duplicate the smooth and even surface of this new paper. Johannot was successful in his experiments, and for his work in this field he was in 1781 awarded a gold medal by Louis XVI."
[19] Hunter, op. cit. (footnote 15), p. 219.
Figure 7.—Wood Engraving by Thomas Bewick, "The Man and the Flea," for Fables, by the late Mr. Gay, 1779. (Actual size.) Note how the closely worked lines of the sky and water have blurred in printing on laid paper. The pale vertical streak is caused by the laid mould.
Wove paper was so slow to come into use that Jenkins gives the date 1788 for its first appearance in book printing.[20] While he missed a few examples, notably by Baskerville, it is certain that few books with wove paper were published before 1790. But after that date its manufacture increased with such rapidity that by 1805 it had supplanted laid paper for many printing purposes.
The reasons for this gap between the introduction and the acceptance of the new paper are not clear; the inertia of tradition as well as the probable higher cost no doubt played a part, and we may assume that early wove paper had imperfections and other drawbacks serious enough to cause printers to prefer the older material.