Elephant (Paper)
Modern equivalent
28 × 23 in = 644 sq in = 711 × 584 mm
A large sheet of 28 by 23 inches, below double elephant and antiquarian in the British naming series.
Elephant sits above imperial in the traditional British sizes, at 28 by 23 inches, and it heads the run of sheets with the best names: elephant, double elephant, antiquarian.
The double is not a double. An elephant is 644 square inches; double elephant, which the Oxford English Dictionary gives as 40 by 26½ inches, is 1,060 — about one and two thirds, not two. Where the crown and demy series double exactly, this one simply borrowed a word. It is worth knowing before trusting any sheet name to describe a ratio.
Double elephant is the most famous sheet in British papermaking, because it is what John James Audubon chose for Birds of America. His prospectus promised double elephant folio printed on the finest drawing paper, and the sheets used by his engraver Havell measured 39½ by 26½ inches — close to the standard without matching it. They were Whatman paper, carrying the watermarks J Whatman or J Whatman / Turkey Mill, dated between 1827 and 1838.
That Audubon specified a paper size in his sales prospectus, before a single plate existed, says something about what these names meant to a nineteenth-century buyer. The sheet was the promise.