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Friday, April 11, 2014

Huband and Nash

September 3, 1913 edition of Paper
 
Mr. Huband was also the mill superintendent at Gilbert Paper Company for 30 years and completed a half century with the firm as director of production.  He later was a member of its board of directors.  As for Mr. Nash, he settled at Gilbert's for a 19 year career after working at paper concerns in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and others in Wisconsin, to include George A. Whiting Paper. Nash would eventually hold 36 patents in papermaking, mastering the evolution of cotton-content paper, developing the original impression watermark and the first centrifugal device for removing dirt from paper pulp.  In 1911, he left Gilbert's to co-found Lakeside Paper Company in Neenah.    

I'll be the first to admit, I know little about paper and I had to look it up to learn what a "deckel" (or as it seems to be spelled today, "deckle") frame is. 

My friends at Wikipedia tell me that, in manual papermaking, a deckle is a removable wooden frame or "fence" placed into a mold to keep the paper slurry within bounds and to control the size of the sheet produced. After the mold is dipped into a vat of paper slurry, excess water is drained off and the deckle is removed and the mold shaken or "couched" to set the fibers of the paper. Some of the paper slurry passes under the deckle and forms an irregular, thin edge.  This accounts for the look of some books with irregular pages, instead of the flat "cut" edges that other books have.  To my surprise, I've learned that this is a very desirable trait for books to have, in that it espouses an elegance from a by-gone era and can command higher prices that flat cut pages. 

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