Help & FAQ

Cold pressed, or CP, is a surface with a slight texture, produced by pressing the finished sheet between cold cylinders. You'll mostly hear it about watercolor papers. Hot pressed (smooth) and rough (heavily textured) are the other two.

The feathery edge you get where wet pulp runs off the mould, on handmade and mouldmade sheets, or where a sheet has been torn while still wet. Machinemade papers can fake it by cutting the wet web with a water jet on the machine.

How well a paper holds its size and shape as moisture and humidity move around it. If you're printing more than one color, this is the property that decides whether your registration holds.

Texture pressed into the sheet at the wet end of the machine by woven wool or synthetic felts. Also called felt marks.

How the fibers are arranged in the sheet. Hold one up to a light and you'll see it. Formation runs from tight to wild depending on the fibers, their length, machine speed and a few other things, and it drives how the sheet behaves: how level it lies, how strong it is, how well it holds its dimensions.

The direction most of the fibers lie, set by how they line up with the travel of the paper through the machine. It matters to you at the fold: paper folds far more easily with the grain than against it.

Papers with a grid pattern in the sheet, left by the pulp resting against wires on the papermaking screen. The laid lines sit close together; the chain lines are farther apart and run parallel with the grain.

A misnomer for Asian papers. No paper is actually made from rice. These are typically kozo, mulberry, gampi or mitsumata.

No. Every paper has two distinct sides. On mouldmade sheets they're the felt side and the mould, or wire, side. The felt side touches the woollen felt first during manufacture; the mould side rides against the wire mesh of the cylinder mould turning in the vat. Many artists and printers prefer the felt side for its more random pattern, while the wire side reads more regular. Worth a test print either way before you commit a run.

The short fibers left clinging to cottonseed after ginning. They're a byproduct of the textile industry that would otherwise be thrown out, and they become the raw material for cotton-content papers.

The handmade process run on a machine. Instead of a mould held in someone's hands, a slowly turning cylinder mould picks the stock up out of the vat and lays it onto a moving woollen felt. You get the consistency of a machinemade sheet with much of the character of a handmade one. Mouldmade papers tend to be stronger and more flexible than machinemade, which is why printers keep reaching for them.

Paper made by hand, which is to say with a mould: a frame covered with a rigid screen (western) or a flexible one (asian), topped with a second frame called a deckle to hold the pulp. The mould goes into the vat, gets shaken to spread the fibers evenly, drains, and what's left on the screen is the sheet. Then it air dries. The whole thing can be done without electricity, and no two sheets come out the same.

A substance, usually gelatin or starch, added to paper so it resists moisture. Sizing is what stops your ink feathering and bleeding through. It goes on after the sheet is formed, either painted or brushed onto the surface (surface sized) or by dipping the sheet in a bath (tub sized).

Handmade, mouldmade and machinemade sheets all behave differently under the press, so we list how each one is made on its own product page, under Full specifications.

Thickness, measured under set conditions and usually given in thousandths of an inch, called points or mils. One point equals 1/1000 inch, so a 15pt sheet is 0.015 inches thick.

Grams per square meter: what a hypothetical square meter of that paper weighs. It's the most useful number for comparing two papers, because unlike basis weight it doesn't change with sheet size.

Metric expresses density as grams per square meter, called grammage. Countries using US paper sizes also use basis weight, which is measured differently and can't be compared directly. So when you need to know how a 300gsm sheet stacks up against an 80lb cover, run it through a weight converter.

Arturo and Crane's Lettra both come in double thick at 600gsm, which is 40pt. Every product page lists its weights, and the weight selector shows what's in stock. If you need something heavier than what's listed, call us; we stock well beyond what's on this site.