Traditional Paper Sizes

[William McCracken]

Hi, William from Vintage Paper Co here.

 

I’m in love with paper, mainly old, no longer made paper for watercolor and printmaking. I wanted to share some interesting info about paper sizes. Most of you probably know all about these but for those that don’t, here’s a stock list from one of England’s legendary papermakers, J Whatman. James Whatman invented wove paper and made some of the most spectacularly beautiful papers of all time which were used by virtually every artist of the day from Turner, William Blake to Rosetti, Constable, Picasso blah blah blah!

 

Here’s the list, check out some of the wonderful size names – my personal favourite being Grand Eagle.

 

Best wishes, William.

[Sandra Strait]

This is very interesting! I think my favorite is Cres. Dble Elephant.  Do you know what year this is from?

[Anonymous]

Thanks for posting this interesting information.

[William McCracken]

The year the list was made? Not entirely other than they stopped making paper by hand in 1955(ish) so it’s from before then. I have their papers from the 1800s and they are on this sheet so I presume that this is the range they always made (in the drawing papers at least).

[Sandra Strait]

Thank you. The company probably used the same list, without feeling the need to change it just for the sake of change.  We could do with some of that these days.