WIES holds 2800 images of rubbings of watermarks in incunabula printed in Spain. Thanks to the hospitality of the Austrian "Kommission für Schrift- und Buchwesen des Mittelalters" (now Institute for Medieval Research, Codicology and Palaeography, Dr. Alois Haidinger, it has become possible to present this sample selected from 8700 rubbings of watermarks in copies of more than 800 editions out of the total of 1000 printed in fifteenth-century Spain. After Haidinger's retirement, Emanuel Wenger took over the further development of the database and its integration into the Bernstein watermark portal memoryofpaper.eu".

The research was started in 2000 and more than 100 libraries have been visited, mainly in Spain but also in the USA (New York Hispanic Society and others), London, Munich, Paris, St. Petersburg, Vienna, Portugal, Belgium, The Netherlands and elsewhere.

In this provisional presentation the images are arranged not by watermark motif but by bibliographical number, mostly by IBE (Catalogo general de incunables en Bibliotecas Españolas) or HBI (Haebler, Bibliografia Iberica) and some other ones like BMC X and Goff. For the investigated editions up to IBE 2679 all the different watermarks have been scanned (1974 images); for the editions with higher IBE numbers, scans of the watermarks have been made selectively (about 800).

Folder 1: Images of the whole A5 format sheets with library, fol.nr, mL (mark left), mR (mark right), numbering of the chainlines from the left or the right side of the incunable sheet.

Folder 2: Zoomed-in rubbings with bibliographical reference plus two-digit number for the watermark in the edition and a ruler with cm scale.

Data about the incunables like author, title and imprint are to be found in the printed reference books (HBI, IBE etc.) but also in the international database of incunables of the British Library, the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC, http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/istc).

access to the database

WIES data: list of bibliographical numbers with links to watermark-images in folder 1 and folder 2 and to the ISTC.

Gerard van Thienen (passed away 2015), former curator of incunabula, Royal Library, The Hague, The Netherlands, editor of WILC - Watermarks in Incunabula printed in the Low Countries.

− January 2012, updated February 2024