Jesus Saenz, a regular commenter at the Bible Design and Binding blog and proprietor of his own Soul DeSaenz blog, has written two articles lately on Bible paper weight that may be of interest to some:
- Bible Paper. Too Thin or Not Opaque Enough?
- ESV Single Column Reference Bible… Or The Myth of The Too Thin Paper
With page thicknesses measured to the .0001″, it’s essential to have the right tool and Mr. Saenz describes his experiences using a micrometer to compare various Bibles in his collection. He found that .0017″ seems to be as much a standard as anything else, but that there were varying degrees of opacity, which affects what is commonly called “bleedthrough”, or how much text of underlying pages you can see when reading.
It was not surprising that the NASB Side-Column Reference Bible from Foundation Publications was one of the most opaque editions with .0017″ paper. This Bible has been a favorite of mine and many others because the opaque paper and wide margins make it ideal for notetaking. In contrast, the ESV Single-Column Reference Bible also had .0017″ paper, but was much more transparent, with greater bleedthrough. The “myth” referred to above is that the ESV SCR is widely panned as having “too thin” paper when it is likely that opacity is the real issue.
I would be curious to have the Holman CSB “Minister’s Bible” similarly measured, as it shares the same criticisms as the ESV SCR.
Surely you don’t need a micrometer to measure Bible paper. You just have to measure the distance between page 1 and page 1000 and divide by 500 (not 1000, think about it). That’s probably much more reliable as it gives the normal average thickness of the paper, not its thickness at a particular spot when crushed by a micrometer.
Peter, I checked more than one page to get an accurate reading. The paper wasn’t crushed since I never slammed the anvils together and to make sure that the paper wasn’t crushed I slid the mic off the paper. If I had crushed the paper with the mic, the paper would’ve torn while trying to take the mic off.
I do not see how measuring the thickness of 1000 pages and then doing division is more accurate than actually measuring one page at a time. Are you supposed to compress the 1000 pages? Or do you measure it with the air trapped between the pages as well?