The University of Kentucky Special Collections Research Center is currently working on a NEH grant to process and digitize a portion of The Wade Hall Collection of American Letters.

Many of the letters contain messages of love from the sender to the recipient, but recently we came across something fitting for Valentine’s day that had nothing to do with the letter’s content.   

Hidden in an unassuming piece of correspondence to the author’s sibling we found this wonderful watermark.

We’d love to know more about this stationary.  It appears to be something that was readily available for some time, as we found paper with the exact same watermark in a different collection that predates this letter by two decades. 

The digital lab in currently in the process of upgrading some our tools including our set of calibration targets. So if you have something to be digitized we probably have a target for it.