Pott (Paper)
Modern equivalent
15 × 12.5 in = 187.5 sq in = 381 × 317.5 mm
The smallest of the traditional British paper sheets, named for its watermark.
Pott sits at the bottom of the traditional sheet sizes, smaller than foolscap and a little over a quarter the area of imperial. It was the cheap paper: account books, ledgers, schoolwork, anything where the sheet mattered less than the price of it.
The name is the watermark. Early English mills identified their sheets by the device in the mould, and a pot or tankard marked this size, exactly as a fool’s cap marked the next one up. The marks became the names, and the names outlived both the marks and the mills.
That is the pattern through the whole family. Crown, foolscap and pott are watermarks; demy and royal and imperial are claims about quality or patronage; elephant is a size. None of them describes a dimension, which is why the sizes have to be memorised rather than worked out, and why the trade kept printed tables of them.