Martin Fone's Blog

The Object Is An Actor Book Corner – October 2017 (1)

A Measure Of Things – Part Ten

The invention and rapid adoption of printing technology was a revolutionary step forward for what we call Western civilisation. Of course, the Chinese and Arabs were light years ahead of us in that respect. And in order to print you needed paper. John Tate established the first paper mill in England near Stevenage in Hertfordshire in 1480, although it was not until the 1580s that the first successful commercial paper mill was established in Dartford in Kent by a German émigré, John Spilman.

Paper comes in a bewildering array of shapes and sized and it was not until 1959 that some order was established when Britain adopted the International Standards Organisation’s system of sizing paper, but we will save that for another time. Before that we had the British Imperial system of paper sizes. Some of the nomenclature that you may be familiar with includes Imperial which was a sheet sized thirty inches by twenty-two, the Emperor – a whopping 72 inches by 48 – and foolscap, which got its name from the watermark, a fool’s cap and bells, that was ingrained into the paper. Its dimensions were 13.25 inches by 16.25 in its cut form and 13.5 by 17 in its uncut form.

Many of the paper sizes were too big for practical purposes and so they were folded, to make it easier to print on and to bind into a book. Naturally, this developed a vocabulary of its own. A folio was used to describe a piece of paper that had been folded in half, to produce two sheets of paper and, assuming double-sided printing, four pages upon which to write. A quarto described a sheet of paper that had been folded twice to produce four sheets and eight pages. A paper that had been folded three times to produce six sheets and twelve pages was known as a sexton while an octavo had three folds but making eight sheets and sixteen pages. To complete the set, duodecimo had four folds producing 12 sheets and 24 pages whereas the four folds of the sextodecimo produced 16 sheets and 32 pages.

Turning back to the foolscap paper that we commonly used before the introduction of A4 paper, it was technically foolscap folio – something to throw in at the watercooler when you are reminiscing about the old days with your colleagues.

Paper in single sheets is rarely much use to anyone – it is normally sold in multiples and, as you might expect, a set of terms were developed to describe quantities of paper. As Brits, we cheerfully eschewed the convenience of that foreign abomination that was the decimal system and based our Imperial system of paper quantities on dozens. I suppose as that was the basis of our currency, it made pricing easier.

The basic unit of quantity was the quire which consisted of two dozen sheets. Twenty quires made up a ream and so if you ordered a ream of paper you would get 480 sheets. Two reams made up a bundle and five bundles – a total of 4,800 sheets – equalled a bale. Just to complicate matters further, a printer’s ream was made up of 512 sheets to allow for wastage so that the finished product was more likely to equate to the ream of 480 sheets that the customer was expecting.

All this was to change, as we shall see next time.