Does anyone have any insight into the paper that Carleton Watkins printed on? In particular was it a store-bought version that was pre-coated with albumin or did he self coat his paper?

If you look closely at some (but not all) of the prints you will notice a thin, perhaps 1/4”, line of under development running along one if not two of the edges. I'm speculating that resulted from the paper having curled up from the albumen during the coating process and not having absorbed the same amount of albumen as the rest of the sheet. I've noticed this on my own coatings but since I was printing a 5x7 negative on 8x10 paper it presented no problem. The solution, in my case, would seem to be to print 8x10 negatives on 9x11 paper cut down from 11x14 thus allowing for the curl-up.

You would think that a pre-coated version of albumen paper, which was available in the 19th century, would be free of such edge defects but were they? Surely Watkins was aware of the propensity of the paper to curl during coating but perhaps he was limited to the size on hand if he coated his own. What do you think?

Thomas