Ever wondered why some paper folds perfectly and lies flat, while other sheets just want to spring back? The secret lies in paper grain! It’s a fundamental concept in bookbinding, and it’s super important to get it right.
What Exactly Is Paper Grain?
You might not have thought about it before, but paper, much like wood, has a ‘grain’ – fibres that run predominantly in a specific direction.
Think about a thin piece of wood: it’s much easier to break it cleanly along the grain than it is to snap it across the grain, which often results in a jagged, uneven break.
Paper behaves in a very similar way. When paper is manufactured, the fibres naturally align themselves in a particular direction. If you try to tear a piece of paper down the grain, you’ll get a relatively clean, straight rip. Try tearing it across the grain, and you’ll find it resists more and results in an untidy, rough edge.
You can also feel the grain when you bend the paper. If you fold a sheet of paper along its grain direction, it will yield easily and cleanly. However, if you try to bend it against the grain, you’ll feel resistance, and the fold will be less crisp, often feeling stiffer.
Why Is Paper Grain So Important in Bookbinding?
Simply put, for bookbinding, you want your paper to fold along the grain direction. This ensures that the paper folds easily, lies much flatter when creased, and ultimately sits properly within your finished book. If you use paper with the grain running in the wrong direction, you’ll find the pages tend to curl, resist lying flat, and can seriously impact the final look and feel of your bound volume.
When you hear or read about paper being “short grain” or “long grain,” it refers to how the grain runs in relation to the paper’s dimensions. For most bookbinding projects, especially when creating notebooks or books where the page orientation is portrait (taller than wide), you’ll want short grain paper. This means the paper’s grain runs parallel to the shorter edge of the sheet. Long grain paper, conversely, has the grain running along its longer edge.
The image below shows you short grain and long grain, which is short grained paper.
So, you can see the critical importance of selecting the correct paper grain for your bookbinding projects.
Working with Different Paper Grains
There’s nothing stopping you from using long grain paper in bookbinding, but you generally only do so if you’re cutting the paper down, which then effectively makes it short grain for your new, smaller page size. For example, standard A4 printer paper, the kind you load into your printer in packs of 500, is almost always long grain. However, if you want A6 paper for a notebook, you can cut the A4 sheets in half to give you A5-sized paper, which will now be short grain relative to that A5 dimension!
With handmade paper, the fibres are often laid in a more random fashion, meaning it typically doesn’t have a distinct grain direction. This makes it versatile for bookbinding, though you should keep in mind that due to the nature of the fibres, it might not fold quite as neatly or precisely as machine-made paper.
You can often purchase specifically made short grain paper from specialist bookbinding suppliers like Shepherds of London. I’ve also bought A5 short grain paper from paper stationers like PaperMill Direct.
Hopefully, this sheds some light on what paper grain is and why choosing the correct, short grain paper is so important for successful bookbinding. It’s certainly something I learned the hard way when I was self-teaching, looking at my first few books made with A4 printer paper, wondering why the pages never folded nicely and curled in all the wrong places!
Did you already know about paper grain, or was this a new insight for your bookbinding adventures? Share your experiences in the comments!
