Epigraphy and palaeography

Der Abklatsch leads two lives, and a learner usually meets the wrong one first. In everyday German it is a put-down: ein billiger Abklatsch is a cheap knock-off, a sequel or a building that copies something better and loses whatever made it good. In the epigrapher’s workroom the same word names the most faithful copy there is. Damp paper is laid over the stone and beaten into every cut with a stiff brush; once dry, it lifts off with the letters standing in relief, including strokes the eye no longer finds on a verwittert surface. English calls this a squeeze. So the word a reviewer uses to dismiss an imitation is, on an archive shelf, a copy that keeps the depth of every stroke, which no photograph can. The sentence around it decides which sense is meant, and in this list it is always the second.