Waste paper? (Collectors' Notes).(Brief Article)

In my office, awash with paper, despite the wonders of computers and the World Wide Web, the following contribution from Thomas Suarez, a dealer in and researcher of antiquarian maps, gives pause. He writes:

Until the advent of machine-made paper in the early nineteenth century, paper remained an expensive commodity that was not to be wasted. Printing houses did not summarily discard old or faultily printed sheets. For example, ifyou look at the backside of the moving parts of any early printed volvelle (a circular device, generally of paper, containing one or more rotating disks and used for mathematical calculations, generally ofan astronomical nature), you will likely find random printing on the hidden sides, as they were most often cut from "recycled" paper that had been used previously Similarly, pages with printing errors were often fixed by pasting correction slips on the affected parts.

A fairly typical example of a sheet of paper having been corrected in this way is seen in the photograph at the left, which shows a leaf from Part 2 of Der ander Theyl der Newlich erfundenen Landtschafft Americae, by Theodorde Bry (1528-1598). Originally, the wrong image was printed on the page; whether the error was discovered before or after binding the book is not known. However, rather than discard the sheet and/or ruin the binding the correct plate was struck on a scrap piece of paper, which was trimmed to the plate-mark and pasted over the wrong image. The repair slip has loosened at the corner, readily exposing the original error; however, such repairs can also be detected by ...