[Scriptoris] Trivia about paper jargon

[Elaine]

June 15, 2009

Greetings, kind Gentles,

Just a little trivia about papers that you might want to refresh  
yourself with:

Paper made of linen or cotton  ("rag") will do better than paper with  
lignin in it. The lignin will undergo a chemical change which causes  
the wood-based papers (made of lignin and cellulose) to yellow, like  
newspapers. Some papers will have a percentage of rag and the balance  
filled in with wood pulp.
True 100% rag paper is getting harder to manufacture since so many  
fabrics have a marriage of cotton and polyester, and that makes them  
unusable for converting to paper. (Whistler did an etching of "The  
Rag Pickers.")

Check to make sure the paper is "archival" or "museum" grade. Paper  
that says it is "acid free/buffered" will eventually revert to its  
original state and there's no guarantee that it will stay white.  
Sulfite is not a bad thing in paper, the best may have it.

The American paper thickness jargon says how many 500 sheets of paper  
will weigh if stacked (no requirements for size). The European jargon  
concerns one cube of paper measuring 1 meter in three dimensions and  
termed "gsm" (grams per square meter). The lower the number, the  
thinner the
paper. One of the thinest is a 9 and is called "onion skin".

If you use thin  paper and are painting, hope for a day with low  
humidity (paper absorbs water from the air, as well as from the  
brush) and use as little water as  you can but still have the medium  
behave the way you want it to. (Off the subject--use distilled water  
or reverse osmosis water since tap water has God-knows what chemicals  
in it. Those chemicals may react with your paint or ink and  
eventually change the color or its permanency--until it's faded.)

Surface terminology of "Hot Press" or "Smooth" means the damp fibers  
have been pressed ("calendered") between two hot rollers to more or  
less iron the damp, matted fibers. "Rough" means the paper has been  
allowed to dry freely so that the fibers will buckle about one  
another, leaving the sheet extremely rough. (Note: Islamic papers  
which are "calendered" have been hand-burnished with a stone.)

When the fibers go every which way, looking like they have felted,  
you have "wove" paper. "Laid" paper dates back very early and has  
characteristic lines across it when held to the light. "Laid" paper  
has been pressed with tiny wires on the rollers that the paper is  
forced through. "Bristol" papers may be made like plywood, in which  
several thinner papers have been pressed together to make, say,  two- 
ply paper. Bristol is usually a thicker paper that has a smooth surface.

When you are making a book, get the grain (when fibers are  
directionally aligned) to run from top to bottom so the book will lay  
open for the reader and not flip pages when not held open. Hold the  
paper by an edge and see how limp it is. Now turn the paper 1/4 turn  
and hold the edge to compare what it was the first test. The top-to- 
bottom line of the grain is the limper of the two. The edge you are  
holding is where it should be sewn to make a "signature".

"Foolscap" is an English term for paper that used to have a foolscap  
as a watermark. It is 17 x 13½ inches in size.

Watermarks are custom designs in wire on the rollers that press the  
paper into sheets. Sometimes the designs are in the middle of the  
paper, sometimes randomly placed, sometimes as a border on the edge.  
Watermarks will help you to know which side of the paper is the top.

Scribal help: The sizing is the stiffener that the manufacturer  
either puts in to the slurry before it's made into paper (the more  
expensive way) or onto the paper when it is dredged through the  
sizing (the cheaper way, but not as good). When you find the top of  
the paper is hard to work with when painting or lettering  
("feathering" of the ink is one symptom), you may have paper fibers  
so loosely put together, that the sizing has drizzled to the bottom  
of the sheet. Turn it over and you may find the surface highly  
improved. That's a thing professionals look for when they test a  
paper before they commit to working on it.

[Sneaky backdoor gossip: Neiman-Marcus watermarked stationery is  
actually Crane-manufactured. N-M is the only company they do that  
for. That stationery will eat nicely honed nibs for breakfast!]

Handmade papers will have a pressed area by the ragged edge where the  
paper fibers have sneaked out between the frames of the screens that  
squeeze the slurry into a sheet. Fake "hand-made paper" will have a  
cut edge that is random in its edge, but will lack the pressed area  
where screens would have mashed the "escapee" fibers. Handmade paper  
is usually extra rough in surface.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head right now.

Hope what little bit I have contributed will help to make sense of  
all the info the manufacturers put on the wrappings and in the ads.  
Some of you can add to this---and I wish you would, so we could all  
learn more about our tools. One is never so advanced that they do not  
have to study.

YIS,
HL Lete Bithespring, Steppes