Rolls of Paper and Rectangular Cuboids
Why aren't more books square?
Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author who is also a librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me (and my dog!) so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!
Have you ever thought about why books are rectangular1?
Why is the A5 or the letter size paper shaped like that? Why are books more often taller than they are wide? Why aren’t most books and magazines square? Perhaps you’ve seen the big paper rolls that newspapers used to be printed on, but never thought much about how they get made. Paper just naturally comes on a roll, then it’s cut and printed (or printed and cut), then folded. But that could all just as easily be done in a square shape, after all.
You might be surprised by the answer, which is both more complicated and more mundane than you might think — as complicated as modern industrial machinery, and as mundane as tradition.
These kinds of questions first occurred to me when my parents moved us to Florida in late 1983. (All these years later, I’m still not sure why my parents chose to leave Maine, where I was having a grand old time, other than perhaps my mother’s health, which declined a lot in the initial move from New Mexico to Maine2.)
We drove southbound through Jacksonville on I-95, headed to Orlando. It was a pleasant day and sunny, and we were near the fabled Atlantic seaside, so Mother had the windows rolled down for the salt air.
Until we hit Jacksonville.
The rotten egg smell filled the car, and we started gagging. It was awful. I insisted we turn around and go back to Maine immediately.
We didn’t, of course (alas). Poppa explained that the reason the place smelled so bad was because there was a large paper mill in Jacksonville. I had no idea what that had to do with anything, and aggressively didn’t care, as I was too busy rolling up the window and wrapping a bandanna around my nose and mouth.
I thought about it later, though, as we rolled into a cheap hotel off I-4 and I wondered why a paper mill would smell so damn terrible. As a nascent writer, I loved paper. And books! Books smelled great! Why would a paper mill smell so foul?
Remember that this was in 1983, though, so I did not have a handy Google search to resort to, and we were in a new city with no clue where the closest library might be. It was years before I found out that paper** making is a nasty business and always has been, but they really did not start smelling terrible until the industrial revolution.
It took that terrible odor to pique my interest in the “whys and hows” of book production. The more I dug into it, the weirder it seemed to me. How does paper actually get made? Why does it smell bad? Why, out of all the shapes available, are most books rectangles and not squares?
The reason stretches back through several eras of “printed paper3.”
The first short step back into the past is to the beginnings of industrialized book production. Industrialized paper mills are all, still to this day, based on the principles of the Fourdrinier machine, which was patented in 1801. The original used a mesh roll for pulp to be spread out on, then dried and run through rollers.
The pulp is the key here. Modern pulp is usually made from trees, and is refined for industrial processing using a variety of truly noxious chemicals (mechanical pulping is less toxic, but the paper is not long lasting and usually turns yellow pretty quickly). The common rotten egg smell is because of the release of hydrogen sulfide gas. Excessive wastewater and the use of animal byproducts can also contribute to the noxious odor. The reason for all this noxiousness is that pulp has to be slurried well enough to be fed into the industrial paper mill.
But that’s relatively new.
The second step back is how paper was manufactured before industrialization. Prior to that, paper was manually made using wire screens, one sheet at a time. The frames were dipped into the pulp, often several times to get the desired thickness, then dried. Breaking down old rags (the preferred material for pulp up until the 1800s) was more often than not done mechanically (beaten and blended) than chemically. Since paper making was a slow, manual process, pulp making could also be a slow, manual process.
It was easier and more affordable to use large mesh frames to make large sheets that would be then folded and cut, which resulted in a wide variety of paper sizes. That is reflected in the wildly random size of books between the 1400s and 1800s. It wasn’t until the late 1700s that paper sizes became standardized in Europe4.
Still and all, a square frame is generally more stable than a rectangular one. What gives, then, for all the rectangles?
It takes a final, third step back in the history of the book to find the source of rectangles: parchment.
The usable area of an animal’s hide is roughly rectangular in shape. A hide would be cut down to smaller sheets, and the most efficient way to maximize the (very valuable and expensive) usable surface was not to switch from a rectangle to a square, but to cut it down into smaller rectangles. Thus, early codices were collections of individual, rectangular sheets of parchment bound together.
There is a reason the large rolling printing press evolved along with the large rolling paper mill. Form followed function into the industrial revolution, so that when paper-making machines started churning out massive rolls of paper quickly (thanks to all the noxious ingredients used to speed up the pulping slurry process), it just “made sense” to fold and/or cut them down into rectangles. Or, at the point where the rolls were fed directly into large rolling presses, that the layout design for printing hewed to the rectangular form.
It’s what people knew and were familiar with, and making a square broadsheet or book was viewed as a quirky thing to do. Still is. Probably always will be.
So, technically, the reason that most books are rectangular is that they don’t have to be. We just like ‘em like that.
(However, most of the paper mills in Jacksonville have been shut down or moved, so I can guarantee that it now smells just like every other city in Florida.)
The official name of the shape of most books is “rectangular cuboid” but this is not math class, so we’re just calling them “rectangular.”
Let it be known for the record that while I was only about 12 years old, I was furiously against both moves in turn for very practical reasons like “Mother is ill” and “We cannot afford it” and “We don’t know anyone there.” I regret to this day that my folks did not stay in Albuquerque.
I should clarify that despite the rather lax way the term is thrown about, paper is a thin sheet of material of any size, made of cellulose fibers. Paper primarily is made from hemp, linen, and trees, but can me made from other materials such as rags and grasses. Paper is not parchment, which is made from animal hide (there used to be a sharp division between parchment and vellum, but in modern usage it is all lumped together). Nor is papyrus considered paper, despite also being cellulose based, mostly because the manufacture of it is so radically different from paper.
The ISO 216 standard (based on an aspect ratio of √2:1, which has the unique property that when cut or folded in half width-ways, the halves also have the same aspect ratio) was formalized in France in 1798.
In a former life, I had to calculate the number of magazines that could be created from the ends of a newspaper-weight rolls based on the weight of the roll and the weight of a single magazine page. High-speed presses for the full rolls, low-speed presses printed the magazines. Finally, I got a reason to use all that math I learned in elementary school.
What a fascinating behind the scenes about why books are rectangular! I've got a few square books and they're awkward to hold. But Steal Like an Artist, by Austin Kleon is worth a bit of wrangling and propping.
That paper mill smell is awful. Just recently, the mill in Canton, NC, near my childhood hometown, closed down. It was a controversial event. Lots of people lost jobs but those mountain valleys smell better.