imperial

Imperial is a sheet size used in both writing papers and printing stocks. Writing paper comes at 30 by 22 inches; printing paper at 32 by 22 inches. Both are landscape proportions, roughly 1.36 to 1.45 times wider than they are tall. The larger printing size gives more working area for lithography, intaglio, or offset work where registration and bleed requirements consume edge space.

The term belongs to the family of British Imperial paper sizes that dominated before ISO 216 (A, B, C series) gained ground in the mid-twentieth century. Other Imperial-era sizes include foolscap, crown, demy, and royal, each tied to historical hand-papermaking dimensions and press bed widths. Imperial itself sits near the top of the hierarchy for sheet-fed work, larger than royal (20 by 25 inches for writing stock) but smaller than elephant or antiquarian.

Practical Use and Decline

Printmakers, architects, and illustrators relied on Imperial for fine art editions, technical drawings, and high-end commercial work. The size accommodates full-bleed color registration without excessive waste and allows room for crop marks and color bars. Today it sees use mainly in specialty shops and hand-pulled print work, having been displaced by metric and American letter-based workflows in most commercial printing.

Paper merchants still stock Imperial in both weights and finishes, though as a special order rather than standard inventory. Presses built for sheet-fed offset or digital systems often cannot accommodate it without modification. The name preserves its origin in the Imperial measurement system: non-metric, British in origin, and now chiefly historical except in niche trades that value the specific proportions and heritage of the format.