E. E. Thoyts “Old Paper Watermarks”

This collection contains a manuscript notebook with the cover title "Old Paper Watermarks, E.E. Thoyts, 1894." Four items of notes related to watermarks are tipped into the volume, and an additional fourteen items of letters and notes, originally laid in, have been removed from the book. Emma Elizabeth Thoyts (b. 1860), a British researcher who resided in Berkshire, had previously published a handbook on paleography, The Key to the Old Family Deed Chest. How to Decipher and Study Old Manuscripts: Being a Guide to the Reading of Ancient Manuscripts (1893), and would later write a historical study of the Royal Berkshire Militia in 1897. By 1903, Thoyts had married John Hautenville Cope, who had helped to write The Victoria History of Berkshire (1906)

"Old Paper Watermarks" includes an introductory five pages of notes and numerous sketches of watermarks.Thoyts wrote “Finding no work on old paper exists, I set to work to collect the watermarks, beginning with those on the old family papers now at Worthenbury Rectory”; she also noted on the front endpaper “... a good series of old marks would be valuable to an antiquary.” Grouping her sketches by image (unicorns, bulls, grapes, etc.), Thoyts copied watermarks which dated from 1464, but the majority of those depicted are from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There is a partial “index of names” near the end of the book, as well as four additional items of notes and a sketch tipped into the volume. In addition, the collection contains letters and notes about watermarks which were previously laid in the notebook. These include nine autograph letters, all written to Thoyts in 1894, most of them responding to her requests in “Notes and Queries” (in the London Times?) for information about old paper mills. There is also a manuscript booklet titled “Fac Similes of the Watermarks of the Paper of the MSS Volumes in the Library of the N.Y. Historical Society, purporting to be the Journal of Long, Little, etc, Parliaments,” which contains two pages of notes and ten sketches.