Vintage Paper

[Poetman]

I posted a similar question a while ago but was unable to find a rather specific answer. I am hoping those both older and with a greater stationery collection could help guide me. I would like to know what kind of writing/note paper was most common in the 1930's and 40's. I know it was generally off-white and took well to fountain pens--and was presumably readily available--but would like to know specifics. Does anyone know what paper weight, bond, manufacturers, etc would have been common? Surely everyone was buying deluxe, expensive paper.

Thanks all!

[Poetman]

No takers? Was high quality paper simply more standard 70-80 years ago? Surely not everyone was buying expensive and/or foreign paper for daily use?

[Lou Erickson]

Don't know about "high quality", but since fountain pens were what people wrote with, paper had to work with them. It wouldn't have been a question; it just did.

 

I've never looked at vintage paper. I've used good paper in my printer since before I got (back) into fountain pens, and to order nice paper to write on doesn't seem odd or strange. It's only expensive if I compare it to crappy stuff.

[Poetman]

No, it's not odd to use nice paper, but it does seem odd that writers would use it for a longhand manuscript draft that would then be typed, or for students to use it for notes that they might not keep.im sure everyone didn't use expensive, imported fine stationery. There had to be inexpensive, but FP friendly, paper readily available. What was it pray tell?

[Tweel]

It doesn't seem to me that the choices in pulp material and processing, or subsequent paper manufacturing, changed a lot over the course of the 20th century. I think the "magic" must be in the sizing formulation.

[Poetman]

I wanted to bump this thread because I am still very interested in finding out what color and type--laid, cotton, bond, etc--of paper would have been most prevalent in the 30's and 40's. This has been difficult to answer. Any ideas--or potential resources come to mind?

[sombrueil]

I have much left of a ream of ivory "Howard Bond" watermarked 8 1/2 x 11 paper I got on ebay a few years ago. Perfectly good for fountain pens although a bit on the toothy side for me. It is probably from the 40's or 50's. So there's your statistical sample of one.

[cleosmama]

You might ask Jill on JBB Pens on Etsy. She sells vintage stuff and may actually have vintage papers. Or at least she might be able to tell you what she has come across. Another place to look is old magazines. I don't know if Collier's (US) ever ran ads for stationery, but perhaps The Strand (UK) did. You can see issues of The Strand here:

 

https://archive.org/details/TheStrandMagazineAnIllustratedMonthly

 

They are digitized, so there would be advertisements and the like.

 

I am thinking that if there is advertising ephemera available for pens, there may be some for paper, too. Wasn't there a book recently published on the topic of paper?

[Moynihan]

I have some flea market finds.

Air mail paper from the 1940's (sorry, in storage, cannot pull to determine Brand) that is very good for FP's with limited show through and anti-bleed through, kinda Tomoe Riverish, but not as slick, and a darker off white. I also have a bok of unlabeled paper, no watermark that is similar but thicker. Think it is from late 1930's or the 40's -50's.

The FP friendly nature of both makes sense, given the period.

Edited March 23, 2015 by Moynihan

[Moynihan]

oooops already posted

Edited March 23, 2015 by Moynihan

[AndyNC]

John Dickinson introduced Basildon Bond in 1911, so we could conclude that that was a quality paper in the 30 and 40's. Queens Velvet, which I find excellent may have not been introduced until after this.

 

http://www.gracesguide.co.uk/John_Dickinson_and_Co.

 

Of course there are those who don't think BB is that good and of course it may have changed.

 

Mind you I'm thinking UK but I can't see which side of the pond you're on.

 

Cheers

 

Andy

[Sailor Kenshin]

Almost every type of regular, ordinary paper made before 1980 or so has been fine for fountain pens. I'm including spiral notebooks that cost around 39 cents, onionskin, accounting legers, letter and legal pads, and bound journals.

[Tryek25]

During the 80's there was a trend in the papermaking industry to shift away from Acid papers to Neutral papers. Also, back in the day the sizing formulation was drastically different, particularly in the use of rosin sizing. Edit: also the proportion of alum being applied to paper has significantly decreased since then. The reduction of both these chemicals has changed how paper performs with inks.

Edited March 27, 2015 by Tryek25

[sidthecat]

As I've been cleaning out my closets I've discovered several caches of old Disney animation paper that I'd squirreled away in the last couple of decades. Some of it's letter-sized; a lot of it is appx. 4 x 6" and about half of it is bound in pads.

Why is this exciting? It's very smooth-surfaced and 100% rag. Disney stopped making it long ago when the digital tail started wagging the animation dog. When it's gone, it's gone, but I'll be in the home by then.

[Sailor Kenshin]

That's an exciting find!

[sidthecat]

Years of self-centered maunderings to look forward to.

[byggyns]

I would guess that some of the bigger changes in the paper making process have been:

 

• Designed use: paper is no longer designed for liquid inks or typewriters. It is designed to function with ball points and ink jet printers, so the paper properties match those uses.
• Sizing: The types of sizing used now is much different. From the acid content (for archival properties) to the chemicals allowed to be used by environmental regulations, to the move to sustainably sourced chemicals, the sizing formulas have changed significantly over the last 60 years.
• Post-consumer recycled content: The post consumer paper in earlier years was directed more toward newsprint & packaging rather than writing and printer / typing paper.
• Raw wood quality: I'm not sure how much this affects paper, but it is a factor in other non-pulp wood products. The quality of the grain structure in modern wood is lower than older slow-growth wood. Modern tree farming & harvesting tecniques combined with higher average global temperatures over the last 30 years result in a different grain structure in the wood.

[alexander_k]

I have no real knowledge of paper, only some experience with old paper: back in the mid-1970s I had the opportunity to clear a few storage rooms in schools, libraries and old offices - mostly old files. I had to check if the documents were of any interest before throwing them away. Anything that could be used I kept, including a lot of unused notebooks and paper from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, which had somehow crept among the documents. I remember that all old paper was yellowish and came in an amazing array of sizes. It wasn't always fountain pen-friendly. 1930s paper was fine and mostly thinner and less absorbent than what we are used to today. I guess it wasn't high quality paper, just cheap paper for everyday office use. Paper quality from after World War II was dramatically lower: thin, glossy paper, more brownish than yellow, rather easy to scratch with a finer stiff nib. Feathering and bleed-through were commonplace. It took me some time to use that paper up; I remember seeing the last sheets around in the early 1990s. I wasn't sorry to see them go.