24th
May
2006
Eight-and-a-Half by Eleven
“8 1/2 x 11 inches. I’ve been avoiding this format all my life. At my first job in New York, we used European-sized stationery. It caused no end of complications, but my (European-born) boss was dedicated to it. ‘Don’t you see?’ he asked. ‘It’s so much more elegant.’ And logical, too: the ISO system is modular, all based on consistent ratios, the square root of two, the Golden Section. Our 8 1/2 x 11 size is based on…well, what, exactly?”