The watermark and the page setting
Even though it is possible to recognize a clear and uniform project in the conception behind the Festival book, in times when the printing process was not automatic, not all copies came out identical, and there can be differences due to both the mechanical process itself (ink, pressure applied on the paper…) and to unavoidable human interventions on specific exemplares.
The copy held at Rutgers has a calf cover with wood underneath. It must be an early copy since the printing is not blurry on the engraving. The die is not, however, very high-quality, and some of the glue also bled into the text.
The copy contains preliminary leaves (leaves that are not considered part of the main text) up to page 4. There is no catchword between quires A and B. The plates unfold to become larger than the book itsself in length and sometimes also in width. They are bound between quires, and sometimes they have been attached within a query by means of a stub.
Interestingly, the plates mght be bound in different locations in different copies of the book, suggesting a way in which the binder, however inadvertently, came to participating in crafting the narrative.
The watermarks
In the exemplar at Rutgers, the watermark can be found only on the title page, and not, as is more common, on the first page of each quire. It has neither been possible to identifiy what the geometrical design of the watermark from the Festival book for Charles VI means, nor to retrieve a similar pattern in the watermark databases available for the period. It is thus both enigmatic in its precise meaning, and also unique.
