School of Print - Understanding Paper Weights

Somewhere back in history, we put someone in charge of creating a system of communicating paper weights *not the heavy thing that holds stuff down on your desk like my magic 8 ball, rather the measure of the heft of a piece of paper*.

I guess there was an American that did this, and probably a European that did it as well. Apparently the American was drunk. We kept the system here anyway.... you might run into terms from both, because paper comes from all over the world. Plus we will throw in one more measure just for fun...  

I try to imagine what the pitch meeting for the new American system must have been like...

"Ok, we figured out how to make this easy, we made up 21 different paper names, we assigned each paper its own random size, then we took varying numbers of sheets of that paper and we weighed it, then we just called it that."

Yea, they were definitely under the influence of something... I really do wonder what the history of this system is. I did not find much info when searching around - there is an ISO standard for the US 536:2019 , but I don't know much about the origins. 

So when someone says it is 80# paper, that really means nothing unless you know if we are talking about text, cover, writing, bond, bristol etc... This is how we determine what is known as the basis weight of paper. It is still the most common terminology for paper in the US, but I think few really appreciate just how wonky the system is. With a lot of online printers, they only offer a few options for paper weights, so you just need to know which one is the thickest, or which one is the cheapest, or whatever your goal is - but with us old school printers that still let you print on any kind of paper, it might be more important to understand the system... that was seriously it - I'm not kidding... 

So here is how it works - first you have to figure out what kind of paper we are talking about. There are 13 different groups of paper names according to wikipedia - the most common are probably - Text (also known as book and offset), Cover, Writing, Newsprint, most of the ones we use in printing today are below, but there are a few more out there... Who decided that 480 sheets for tissue? You could have eliminated a whole variable there...