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Historians spent so long castigating their more strictly-trained predecessors for their obsession with antiquarian drudgery and their lack of imagination that they left us, their students, totally helpless in philological matters. Reading Soviet-era catalog descriptions is an especially humiliating experience, since the catalog’s author inevitably manages to pry more information out of the text than you can even dream of doing. I can barely figure out what a watermark is supposed to depict half the time; they’ve not only decoded it but found the precise year and date the paper was manufactured.
