This is a continuation of the discussion at [ 11/8/69 Dripping Pen Card & 340 Cipher ] regarding the watermark on the 340 character cipher included with the “Dripping Pen” card dated 11/8/1969 reading “SAKS FIFTH AVENUE”
I have not found any further discussion outside of the Dripping Pen letter, and some discussion of Woolworth’s here [Woolworth’s Monarch cut Eaton watermarked paper] so at the risk of redundancy I should point out that there are at least three other letters with at least one page bearing this watermark. Including the Dripping Pen 340 cipher, they are as follows, organized chronologically by date received:
And the final page (image taken from the reverse side of page 6) of the “Bus bomb” letter dated 11/9/1969.
I have tried to resolve the watermark elsewhere and in most cases I have been unable to do so with the images I was able to find. In some cases, that may be partly a consequence of occlusion by the letter script coupled with digital artifacts resulting from lower resolution images being upscaled which makes surveying subtle contrasts in the paper stock basically impossible. In other cases, such as the 7/31/1969 letter to the Vallejo Times Herald with part 1 of z408, the quality of the official release of a document document is too low or the contrast is too drastic to allow any properties of the actual paper to be visible, regardless of the available tools.
Nonetheless, there are some scans that should be of sufficient quality to resolve the watermark if it is there, and yet even with a lot of tweaking I was unable to see it. This is notable because, for the watermarks I did end of finding, there was actually quite a bit of wiggle room in manipulating the levels wherein the watermark would come in to sharp and obvious relief. It is still possible that the watermarks are elsewhere on these letters. In particular, it seems to defy explanation that I wasn’t able to see the watermark on the other five pages of the Bus Bomb letter. I may return to that letter in particular and try again in the future, but in the meantime, here is a survey of other letters to which I took the same approach and was unable to see a SAKS FIFTH AVENUE WATERMARK.
DISCUSSION
My conservative, fully jaded appraisal of this observation is that it is most likely not that useful, especially given the possibility that watermarks on certain letters are simply not resolvable with the scans publicly available online. Even if we could be 100% sure which letters have watermarks or don’t, the most it really demonstrates is that some letters were probably written from a common ream, and therefore the watermarks simply reinforce the notion that, at the very least, these letters are from a single author, which is already the official status of the letters sampled above.
Having said that, if this is genuine data and multiple paper stocks were used for different Zodiac communications, then I have some interesting observations to share (interesting to me) regarding their distribution over time and contents that are worthy of note; fertile ground for some classic speculation and, hopefully, discussion.
First, not every cipher is on or accompanies a letter written on paper with a SAKS watermark. As far as I can tell, the letter with the Mount Diablo code (6/26/1970) does not have a watermark. That scan is of particularly high quality, better than any other I have looked at in the hunt for these watermarks. Additionally, the “My name is” cipher (4/20/1970) does not appear to be on SAKS paper, although the available scan image is particularly low resolution.
However, these two ciphers were also received in a relatively short space of time, within 2 months of eachother. This is roughly equivalent to the time between the receipt of z408 and z340. Notably, the time between the receipt of z340 and the “My name is” cipher is nearly 5 months. If we treat the z408/z340 letters as a pair, and do the same thing for the “My Name Is” and Mount Diablo Map code, then that 5 month respite constitutes more than double the latency between ciphers of the same group. This is hardly an earth shattering insight, but it seems that Zodiac might have abandoned this SAKS branded paper stock sometime between November 1969 and April 1970, or possibly before the Belli letter in late December, 1969 whether this was an intentional or incidental choice.
Second, there are two letters that contain schematic type diagrams of electrically powered, photosensitive bombs. The first, received 11/9/1969, one day after the “Dripping Pen” card and z340 cipher, includes at least one page with a SAKS FIFTH AVENUE watermark. The second, the “My Name Is” letter does not appear to have this watermark. Again, this might be simply a result of Zodiac generally abandoning this paper stock in favor of another, and that change need not be any more complicated than he exhausted one ream of SAKS paper and moved on to another that simply didn’t have this characteristic.
The issue is that there are letters received prior to November 9, 1969 that, as illustrated above, might not have this watermark and, therefore, would have been written on different paper stock from a different ream. If they do have the watermark, I cannot see it. If I can’t see it, there’s a possibility that it’s not there. While I can think of several trivial reasons for that to happen, one intriguing possibility is that watermark and non-watermark letters were written in different locations with different supplies on hand.
The two main examples of these pre-November non-watermark letters would be the Zodiac “debut” letter from August 1969 and the “Stine” letter from October,1969. What stands out to me about these letters is that neither contain schematic, technical information or are accompanied by ciphers. Conversely, while I can’t opine on the July 31 letter to the Vallejo Times Herald for reasons I have enumerated above, every letter prior to December 20, 1969 is either accompanied by a cipher or a technical illustration. This could potentially suggest that these letters might have been written in the presence of books, possibly in a library, an office or workshop with technical manuals or textbooks, perhaps as simple as a study with a bookshelf containing either legitimate resources on electrical engineering, basic cryptography, and chemistry, or non-professional titles, perhaps underground books like the Anarchist’s Cookbook. These resources would, in turn, be on hand for the author as he tried to generate functional ciphers and credible bombs. There are a number of location types that could supply such resources, including something as simple as a study in the author’s house, as long as there is sufficient reason for the office supplies used by Zodiac in either case to be segregated. Non-watermark letters, in contrast, would not leave the author in need of references and could be written anywhere, whether that’s substantially far away or as close as a kitchen table of living room.
What matters though is whether it is a place other than his residence because, unless he brought his own paper from home, then it would mean Zodiac was writing multiple letters at a single place at different times and the paper was sourced from that location. That, again, could be a library, and office, some sort of workshop; anywhere. The exciting thought is that it might have been A) a public place where people knew him, and/or B) a place with a negotiated contract with a supplier that might have delivered the same paper stock over an arbitrary period of time and leaving behind a record.
I think that’s about as far off the reservation as I’m prepared to take this idea at the moment.
To be clear, assuming this distinction between watermark letters and non-watermark letters even exists, it in no way necessarily follows that, therefore, they must have been written in different places. 50 years from Zodiac’s spree, with each passing year we’re grasping at successively smaller straws, and that’s ultimately the spirit of this lead. If nothing else, at least it’s interesting to think about.
And if anyone could help me out here, I would appreciate it. I could really use a sanity check. I believe I can see the watermark, but I’m also wondering whether it’s pareidolia. Does anyone else see it? Upper left, top of the words pointed to 9 o’clock, letters are backwards.
maybe down the left side margin. Hard to say.And if anyone could help me out here, I would appreciate it. I could really use a sanity check. I believe I can see the watermark, but I’m also wondering whether it’s pareidolia. Does anyone else see it? Upper left, top of the words pointed to 9 o’clock, letters are backwards.
@thedude How about this?
and here is the relevant portion, cropped
[EDIT] Okay, I’m pretty positive it’s there. I couldn’t see the ‘U’ before, but it’s pretty clear in the gif and right where it should be. Interestingly, I couldn’t find it on the reverse side of this same page.
@tegean out of curiosity I tried contacting Saks Fifth Avenue to see if they may have a historian or someone similar on staff. I couldn’t get through and probably need to try harder.
what interests me is Saks is a very high end store… who buys high end paper? Who were their clients? Did they sell to boutiques? Government agencies?
It may be interesting to know.
@thedude I’m with you on this one. I’m not certain, but in digging through old phonebooks I found an ad for SAKS that left me with the impression that they only had two outlets in California in 1969, 70. One in Palo Alto and the other in San Francisco.
Of course, a few years ago I was also toying with the insane idea that the ciphers were made with mimeograph paper and typewriter strikethroughs on a mimeograph stencil, so I’m possibly out of my mind on this one. Still, it’s a lead, although I’m not sure, even if there was some kind of historian or specialist who would know about their products and clients that there’s really a good approach for paring down that kind of dataset, assuming they would even release it. To my mind, in trying to tackle that problem, the questions to ask are; what kind of paper stock is it? and what sorts of context would that paper typically be used?
Just spitballing though.
By the way, for the purpose of sharing data, these watermarks ought to be visible on both sides. From the first letter to the SF Chronicle, July 31 1969 (See upper left corner)
It doesn’t look like SAKS used a serif logo at any point after 1946. I am having a horrible time finding anything about straight up paper save for Bloomberg making a federal case out of carbon copy paper. I have been unable to find any examples of paper from SAKS that includes a watermark.
and I just want to say that, when it comes to anything that even remotely sounds like a someone possibly looking to shop for nonsense, no matter how razor thin I’m sure the margin on a single toner cartrige is for the seller after divying up the revenue between the online marketplaces, the manufacturer and the government, Google has decided that it is a search aggregator in name only. Google is the great satan. So is Bing. Yandex is better, but it still sucks.
[EDIT] Well, I guess I’ve just completely wasted peoples’ time here because if I really had paid attention it would be abundantly clear that this topic has been covered before elsewhere. Here I am spending basically a year off and on assuming this paper stock has something to do with SAKS FIFTH AVENUE when the consensus for decades appears to be that this was a product purchased from Woolworths. Now, as with everything, of course, even the FBI can’t seem to make up their mind about where this all was sourced from and neither can I because I have heard that this was alternately Eaton brand monarch-cut paper (with an “Eaton” watermark, explain that to me) or “Fifth Avenue” brand paper purchased from Woolworths.
I have found vintage typing paper from Eaton
and I have also found Fifth Avenue brand visiting cards
Fifth Avenue brand Air Mail envelopes I assume from the good old days of the de Havilland Comet when you had a 50% chance of arriving at your destination and a 50% chance of being turned inside out by a rapid decompression at 10,000 feet and having your mail lost somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
and that appears to be a registered trademark, but if you thought I was going to be able to find any of these products bearing a matching watermark to that found on the letters then you deserve to have holes, er, I mean, nevermind.
So as for backtracking this story, it appears to either come from Graysmith or the FBI files. Now I’ve spent a bit of time with the FOIA releases from the FBI files but to be honest with you I can only read declassification forms for so many days before my brain turns to jelly and I can’t remember anything I read and it was all a waste of time. I am basically positive that those files do not contain anything other than photostatic scans of the evidence everybody already knows about and commentary about some forensic tests, so I have no idea how they would have sourced this “Eaton” paper. It’s the same with Graysmith. Best I can tell, this rumor started with him and, naturally, it is unsourced and therefore unverified unless there’s a magic bibliography button nobody told me about that gets pressed when you buy copies of all of Graysmith’s books which I want nothing to do with if it means I have to sit through 80 million circumstantial pieces THE PLOT THICKENSing “evidence” just to find out whether it came straight out of his ass or whether there is an actual source for that claim.
Investigating this case should not be like gambling, like popping quarters into a slot machine (whichever book) and hoping to God you can get some verifiable information out of it. Moreover, a fact cannot be allowed to become canon just because it came from a minimally commercially viable product. There’s nothing in the appendices that addresses this issue, not even in the Russian bootleg pdf I have. So, until I see an actual piece of paper out in the wild with that watermark, I’m going to have to assume that nobody actually knows the answer.
EATON watermark
EATON Berkshire paper
FOUND IT. THANK YOU REDDIT.
TELLS US ABSOLUTELY NOTHING THAT EVERYONE BUT ME ALREADY KNEW BUT IT’S STILL COOL.
