At some point during your collecting life, you will try to explain the difference between laid and wove paper to someone who did not ask. This article is for that moment.
Paper Types
The Paper Type field in Shelvd records what the text block is printed on. This matters because paper affects a book's appearance, feel, weight, aging characteristics, and value.
Laid paper: Made on a mould with parallel wire lines visible when held to light. Standard from the invention of printing until the late eighteenth century. The chain lines and laid lines are its fingerprint.
Wove paper: Made on a woven wire mesh — no visible lines. Invented in the 1750s and dominant from the nineteenth century onward. Smoother, more uniform.
Handmade paper: Each sheet formed individually in a mould. Irregular edges (deckle edges), visible chain lines, sometimes with a watermark. Prized for quality printing and limited editions.
Machine-made paper: The industrial standard. Uniform, efficient, and — if made with wood pulp after 1850 — slowly destroying itself through acid deterioration.
India paper: An extremely thin, opaque paper used for Bibles, dictionaries, and luxury editions. Allows thick texts to be bound in manageable volumes.
Vellum paper: Not actual vellum (which is animal skin) but a smooth, heavy paper that imitates its appearance. Used for special editions.
Bible paper: Similar to India paper — thin, lightweight, slightly translucent. Named for its most famous application.
Rice paper: Technically not paper at all, but a pith material from the rice-paper plant. Used in Asian printing and occasionally in European fine press work.
Edge Treatments
The Edge Treatment field describes how the three exposed edges of the text block (head, tail, fore-edge) are finished:
Gilt edges (a.e.g.): All edges covered in gold leaf. Protective and decorative. Common in fine bindings and prayer books. The abbreviation stands for "all edges gilt."
Top edge gilt (t.e.g.): Only the top edge is gilded — a popular Victorian treatment that keeps dust from settling between pages.
Marbled edges: Edges dipped in a marbling trough, producing swirling colored patterns. Often matched to the marbled endpapers and boards.
Sprinkled edges: Edges spattered with colored ink. A quick, cheap alternative to gilding or marbling.
Gauffered edges: Gilt edges with impressed or tooled decorative patterns. A show-off move popular in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries.
Stained edges: Edges colored with a single dye — red, blue, yellow. Common in trade bindings.
Deckle edges (untrimmed): The natural, ragged edges left by the papermaking mould. Deliberately preserved in some editions as a mark of quality or artisanality.
Rough-cut / unopened: Pages not separated by a paper knife. An unopened book is one whose pages were never cut apart — a collector's prize or an accusation of illiteracy, depending on your perspective.
Endpapers
The Endpapers field records the leaves that connect the text block to the boards:
- Plain — undecorated, usually white or cream
- Marbled — hand-marbled paper, often matching the edges
- Decorated — printed patterns, maps, illustrations
- Paste paper — hand-decorated with colored paste designs
- Free endpaper — the leaf that turns freely (as opposed to the pastedown, which is glued to the board)
Endpapers are often where you find the most interesting evidence of ownership: bookplates, inscriptions, stamps, prices penciled in by dealers. They're the book's diary.
Text Block
The Text Block field describes the structural condition of how the pages are held together: tight, solid, shaken, loose, broken, repaired. This is about engineering, not aesthetics — a tight text block is one where the sewing holds firm and the pages don't shift.
📖 Related on the blog: Paper: A Material History, Why Old Books Smell