We’re surrounded by paper on an every day basis, but do you ever wonder why we use 8.5” by 11” as our standard size? I mean it’s a pretty bizarre ratio….  why not something more divisible like 9” by 12” or something that folds perfectly into square sectors?
 
Dealing with papers, envelopes, and cards day in and day out you develop a curiosity for these standardized sizes – what makes them “right” and who decided so! Well the answer starts over 400 years ago across the sea in the Netherlands, where the dutch invented the two-sheet mold for papermaking in the 1660s. Apparently, the average maximum stretch of a vatman’s arms was 44″. In terms of depth, many molds were around 17″ front-to-back because the laid lines and watermarks had to run from left to right. So, to maximize the efficiency of papermaking, the Dutch molded 44” x 17” sheets…which cut down nicely to eight 8.5″ x 11″ pieces of paper. A great size for a hand penned letter!
 
Skip to the machine age, American president Herbert Hoover’s Elimination of Waste in Industry program created the Committee on the Simplification of Paper Sizes, made up of printing industry reps and the Bureau of Standards. The committee  stuck with the standard invented by the Dutch in order to help hand-made paper makers stay in business. (The committee actually standardized 17” x 22” as the basis for letter sheets, and 17” x 28” as the basis for “legal” sheets, which yields four annoying 8.5” x 14” sheets that lawyers love to mess us up with.)
 
We Canadians however, dared to be different, the Ontario government set the example of switching from Letter to the Metric A4 size, but gave up in the late 1980s at the same time that the Mulroney federal government bailed on metrication, and went back to U.S. Letter. The rupture between what was available and in use outside government was too confusing and expensive to maintain. And so paper remains Imperial for the most part in Canada.
 
So, ironically, while the Dutch and the rest of the planet has long since moved on to measuring paper in the very logical metric units and grams per square metre and such, we Canadians find ourselves with our American neighbours, still confusing our clients and our staff with “lbs” and “basis weights” and “M’s” and “legal” and “#10 envelopes”.
 
I wouldn’t exactly call it genius, but we make it work!