#parchment problems

[an-ruraiocht]

portal fantasy where the alternative world is almost identical to our own except parchment is actually a synonym for paper in this world. we discover this halfway through when a character from our world goes to correct one of the locals and then is like. huh. wait. what

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

came back to tell you that i'm reading a fantasy novel by an author whose previous books i have really enjoyed and there was just one line -- one fucking line -- where she uses parchment as a synonym for paper (as in, the same object is described as both, and behaves like paper even when being described as parchment) and my kindle annotations just say NO

(and obviously like. it's fantasy. but a) it's fantasy grounded in history and b) why use the word parchment at all when you've just used the word paper therefore telling me that paper exists in this world. why did you feel the need to use a different word, which is not in fact a synonym but a different material used for similar purposes. carelessness that's why) (and no copyeditors know what parchment is to comment on this. apparently. starting a campaign to give publishing employees an education in historic writing surfaces)

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

I thought vellum was made of skin and parchment was cellulose based? maybe I got it mixed up with papyrus because the words sound somewhat similar…

parchment and vellum are the same thing, vellum is usually used for high quality calfskin and parchment for everything else (goatskin, sheepskin, etc). i tend to use parchment for all of them because the distinction is fuzzy anyway, and when the parchment is high enough quality it can be really hard to tell what animal the skin is from without doing, like, dna analysis or whatever, so at that point it doesn't really matter. i think you are thinking of papyrus, yes!

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

briefly (or maybe not briefly, we'll see) killing reblogs on the parchment bingo. if i had known it would spread that much and be treated as an educational resource, i would have worded the whole thing differently, framed it in more positive terms etc – things you might not know about parchment, ways to make your novels better, whatever

the trouble is that a) i DIDN'T intend it as an educational resource and b) i'm fairly sure if i'd done that it WOULDN'T have spread the way it did when framed negatively as mistakes people make, because the internet thrives on negativity and would rather pull things apart than build them up

but. i actually don't love being part of that and i regret contributing to that phenomenon when i generally try to focus my energies on things i like rather than things i don't like. i genuinely didn't think it would spread beyond my immediate circle because to my mind it was niche bitching that around 20 people would care about, not something people would share widely, but that's not an excuse, I've been on the internet long enough by now to know better

anyway. mercy killing the post for a bit in the hope of slowing the spread

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

what I’m writing currently takes place in the mid 1800s so I don’t have much use for your parchment advice but god I wish I did

ah well clearly your characters will need to consult an older manuscript at some point and comment on its materials and how different it is to the paper they're used to

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

Buy On Parchment by Bruce Holsinger from Waterstones today! Click and Collect from your local Waterstones or get FREE UK delivery on orders

i told my uncle about the parchment discourse and he mentioned seeing this book that came out last year. i haven't read it and i don't know if it's good but it sounds like it would be of interest to the people asking me for recs on things to read about parchment manufacture and its history and impact

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

Do you have any resources or places to find resources on parchment and its ways? So that I may write the sexy historically accurate scribes more easily

here's a post i made earlier this month with some links to videos about parchment making and things. i think videos are a good source for this kind of thing bc it's the physicality of the parchment that people often screw up in books and it's something you really need to see if you can (and touch, if such an opportunity comes your way). there are lots more out there beyond what i shared in that post, including about things like ink making and drypoint ruling / setting up the page, etc, so just have a wander around the nerdy corners of youtube and see what's there

here's a post with some other resources

all my posts about parchment including pictures i've reblogged bc they illustrate things i've been talking about are tagged as "parchment problems". i will continue to post and reblog things and put it in that tag

unfortunately for all of youse, as i've noted a couple of times, the majority of my manuscript/parchment knowledge was not obtained from books but from personal experience, conversations with experts, and to some extent, classes i've attended. i've worked in libraries inc. in special collections, visited conservation workshops, chatted to conservators, handled MSs for research purposes, worked with digitised MSs for academic purposes, etc, so i've picked up a lot of things from that rather than from books and written sources that i can easily share!

this is unusual bc usually i have an extensive bibliography but like 90% of my sources for parchment knowledge are "Some Guy Told Me This" and the guy in question is, like, head of manuscripts at an academic library or the top expert at a conservation consortium or whatever, but also you just have my word for it?? so that's not super helpful haha

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

Question from a tanner re: parchment: do you know why it's bendy enough to make into books? Because rawhide tends to break rather than bend (see: drums with which break), and parchment should just be rawhide with the top layer of skin scraped / sanded off. Is it that top layer that makes rawhide stiffer? Or do parchment makers somehow work on it to make it more pliant?

i don't know much about rawhide so it's a little hard for me to compare the processes but i would say it's probably a mixture of materials and processing! firstly materials: it depends what type of skin you used in the first place. the reason they use calfskin for parchment/vellum is that it's much more supple than adult cowskin, which becomes leather instead; goats and sheep are also common for parchment. since rawhide is a byproduct of the leather industry i would expect it's made of the much tougher materials to start with. also, since it's a byproduct, it may be that they've split off the layers that would be used for parchment etc anyway? not sure, this is where not knowing a huge amount about rawhide lets me down

secondly there's the processing and specifically there's a lot of stretching: you stretch parchment over a frame to make it thinner (and larger) and this probably also makes it a lot more pliant, and then you scrape it more at that point, having already got rid of a lot of the gunk before that stage. my cursory googling suggests that rawhide doesn't involve a lot of stretching, so this might also be part of the process of making it bendier, along with how much they scrape off and what they soak the skin in to loosen hair etc in the first place!