Traditional British Paper Sizes
Named sheets, not numbered ones, and most of them double.
Origin
Mill names that hardened into trade standards, in use across British papermaking and printing until the A series displaced them in the twentieth century.
The catch
Crown and demy double exactly. Foolscap does not: a double foolscap is 1.96 times a foolscap, not 2.
| Sheet | Inches | Square inches | Millimetres |
|---|---|---|---|
| Foolscap | 17 × 13¾ | 233.75 | 432 × 349 |
| Crown | 20 × 15 | 300 | 508 × 381 |
| Demy | 22½ × 17½ | 393.75 | 572 × 444 |
| Double foolscap | 27 × 17 | 459 | 686 × 432 |
| Royal | 25 × 20 | 500 | 635 × 508 |
| Double crown | 30 × 20 | 600 | 762 × 508 |
| Elephant | 28 × 23 | 644 | 711 × 584 |
| Imperial | 30 × 22 | 660 | 762 × 559 |
| Double demy | 35 × 22½ | 787.5 | 889 × 572 |
| Quad foolscap | 34 × 27 | 918 | 864 × 686 |
| Quad crown | 40 × 30 | 1,200 | 1016 × 762 |
| Quad demy | 45 × 35 | 1,575 | 1143 × 889 |
| Double quad crown | 60 × 40 | 2,400 | 1524 × 1016 |
The sizes are listed by area rather than by family, which is how a printer would have compared them when choosing stock. It also shows how the series interleave: a double foolscap falls between a demy and a royal, and an elephant sits between a double crown and an imperial. The doubling is worth examining. Crown runs 300, 600, 1,200 square inches and demy runs 393.75, 787.5, 1,575 — both exact. Foolscap runs 233.75, 459, 918, where the second step is exactly double the first but the first is only 1.96 times the sheet. The foolscap series was extended by convention after the fact, and the arithmetic shows the join. None of this is the A-series principle. The A sizes keep their proportions when halved, so A4 and A3 are the same shape. The British sheets alternate between two shapes as they double, which makes them a doubling series rather than a scaling one — the same instinct, four centuries earlier, without the geometry. The millimetre figures are conversions, not definitions. These sheets were cut to inches and the metric equivalents are rounded to the nearest millimetre.