Paper

We’ve been writing things down for a very long time, love notes, grocery lists, accounts of how many jars of garam are owed to that swindler Gaius Severus. We were writing on stone and clay, a very permanent record, but hard to carry in a backpack. We were writing on papyrus, but I wager crocodiles were an unwelcome part of that deal.  Then somebody had the Dr. Mengele idea of writing on animal skins, what we know as vellum. Given hard times I suppose you could eat your words.

They say that paper started in China around 105 CE, and we have some really old fragments that were used to make the case.  A fellow named Cai Lun gets the credit. He was a eunuch.  I was going to go on a side note about eunuchs and castration in the Chinese royal court, but the history of Chinese royalty and their eunuchs does not make for light reading. When castrated, generally, the Chinese took off all the the bits with a knife, not just the dangly bits. That’s as far as I’m going to go. 

Later archeological finds pre-dating Cai Lun show he would not be the inventor, and might not even have been involved in making paper. For my money, he can have the credit. He paid for it.

The breakthrough the Chinese made was noticing that plant fibers, or more specifically cellulose pulp, interlocks when it is spread thin and dried. 

By the 8th century paper was all over the Islamic world. They had water-powered mills, advanced the technology of sizing, and could produce consistent sheets of paper. 

Europe, by the 13th century, was producing what we call rag-content paper. Rag content paper is pulped cloth of discarded textiles and rope.  US currency, if memory serves, was made with the tailings of cotton underwear manufacture for many years. In European history, if something shows up around the 13th century it means it probably involves Al Andalus, the Muslim ruled area of the Iberian peninsula. That was the era of the European push into the region that culminated in the Catholic Monarchs (Isabel and Ferdinand) taking control in 1492.

Things got better, and worse, for paper manufacture during the Industrial Revolution. It turns out you can break down lignin in wood and use the resulting pulp to make paper. Acid was used in the process and that’s the source of the brittle yellowing of old cheap paperbacks. It was very efficient but at the expense of longevity which was previously a benefit to rag content paper.

While we are on the topic of paper, according to some estimates more than 70% of the wood used in making paper comes from tree farms. These are ‘managed forests’ specifically planted and cultivated for use in the paper industry. It is not in the interest of the paper and lumber industry to gobble up the very thing that makes their industries possible, and it doesn’t hurt that there are plenty of people willing to sound the alarm when they transgress the boundaries of good stewardship. 

And one more side trip.  Until quite recently, recycling of paper was not a very green activity.  It was shipped to the third world where it was processed with chemical agents to break down the paper, strip out plastics and bleach color and ink from it. The paper pulp was either shipped back or processed in place, but in either case, ending back here in the west. 

And it’s not clean. To quote wikipedia:

Along with fibres, paper can contain a variety of inorganic and organic constituents, including up to 10,000 different chemicals, which can potentially contaminate the newly manufactured paper products. As an example, bisphenol A (a chemical commonly found in thermal paper) has been verified as a contaminant in a variety of paper products resulting from paper recycling. Groups of chemicals as phthalates, phenols, mineral oils, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and toxic metals have all been identified in paper material. Although several measures might reduce the chemical load in paper recycling (e.g., improved decontamination, optimized collection of paper for recycling), even completely terminating the use of a particular chemical (phase-out) might still result in its circulation in the paper cycle for decades.

Modern times are, in no small part, the result of success and terrible failures of the past. Today’s paper can be clean, environmentally sensitive, archival, and acid-free.

Good Paper

What makes a paper good or better than another is really a matter of both purpose and preference. The basic building blocks start with what the pulp is made of.

Cotton (Rag) papers are well loved and for good reason.  They have long fibers and strong hydrogen bonds (basically the bond plus friction is why paper holds together). It has a soft hand, can last centuries in the right conditions and is respected for its history.  It does have some snob appeal, and certain mills or makes of rag are seen to be premium. 

Alpha cellulose papers are made of refined wood pulp, their fibers are shorter than rag papers and they are well rinsed of lignin.  They are still archival if well made, and a lot of cheaper papers are buffered with carbonates to keep their pH neutral. High quality art and photo papers fall into this category. 

Mechanical wood pulp paper does contain lignin and will yellow and break over time.  It’s fine for printing that is not supposed to last the test of time, like newspapers. 

Papers are sized during manufacture. For printing there’s not nearly as much concern about how a paper is sized as there is for artists using paper for very niche purposes.  The sizing used during manufacture influences strength and how ink interacts with it.  Sizing used afterwards on the surface can control the crispness of marks on the paper and the degree of feathering that might happen with different media.  Again, these are not really considerations for the commercial printshop, all of our papers, inks and toners are designed for reproduction.

GSM or Lbs.

I cannot possibly pass up the chance to provide a little history of how the use of pound and lb comes about. We’ll get to GSM in a moment.

The Romans occupied what became Britain.  Their conversations were so littered with Latin they may as well have studied classics at university. They referred to a unit of mass as the “libra pondo.” Libra meant scale or balance, and pondo was the adverb for by weight. The romans had a need to standardize everything they could get their hands on, and for commerce the libra pondo fit the bill for weighing goods. The standardization stayed around long enough for libra pond to be abbreviated to lb, even though the English shortened the term to pound (pound sterling is related, but not for this current side quest). As ’s’ is how we express plurals, we just slapped that on the end and got lbs the Frankenstein monster of weight abbreviations.

GSM means Grams per Square Meter. If you had a square meter of 300 GSM, it would weigh 300 grams. It’s a measure used for paper, fabric and in the packaging industry for boxes. Office copier paper is about 70 - 100 gsm. A standard business card is around 200 to 350 gsm. Just for fun, here’s how you calculate GSM 

Steps to Calculate GSM:

Take a sample sheet of paper and measure its dimensions (length and width in cm or mm).

1. Convert the area into square meters (m²).
2. Weigh the sample using a precision scale.
3. Use the formula: GSM = Weight (grams) / Area (m²). GSM tells you mass.

GSM does not tell you how stiff a paper is.  It could be possible to have a hand made 300 gsm paper that was positively floppy, just very heavy.

‘Lbs’ is measured as 500 sheets of a particular paper in its base size which can vary by type of paper.  Text weight or Cover weight, for example.  As with most Imperial measurements, ‘it depends’ is part of a complete answer.  

When you are looking for the right weight of paper, it might be better to use common points of reference, like ‘I want it to stand up like a tom cat surrounded by wild hogs’ or ‘like a playing card, fresh from the casino.’

Smooth as oatmeal, surface is everything.

If you put your work on a bumpy surface it will have a bumpy appearance.  If you want it true and smooth like a blueprint, you cannot have us print it on custom made armadillo hide paper.