Foxing
age-related process of deterioration occurring on paper products
Foxing is an age-related process of deterioration that causes spots and browning on paper documents such as books, postage stamps, old paper money and certificates, and on textiles like clothing and artists' canvasses. The name may be a variant form of the English West country dialect term foust and Scots foze, to become moldy. Alternatively, it may derive from the fox-like reddish-brown color of the stains. Paper that is affected is said to be "foxed".
Incidence
Foxing is rarely found in incunabula, or books printed before 1501. Decrease in rag fibre quality may be a culprit. As demand for paper rose in later centuries, papermakers did not use as much water and spent less time cleansing the rag fibres used to make paper. An early work of art to have been affected by foxing is the Portrait of a Man in Red Chalk, a drawing on paper by Leonardo da Vinci.
Foxing also occurs in biological study skins or specimens, as an effect of chemical reactions or mold on melanin. Textiles, such as articles of clothing, that are affected may also be said to be foxed.
“Foxing” enters the record as age-related process of deterioration occurring on paper products. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Foxing, age-related and process can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1454672. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1501.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Foxing” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.