I mentioned to a guy yesterday that as he lived at 144, that that number was a gross.
He didn’t quite get it.
Has the use of 144 as a gross died out?
Does anybody refer to 25 sheets of paper as a quire? That incidentally is a very useful Scrabble word.
September 5, 2012 - Posted by AnonW | World | Numbers, Words
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What this blog will eventually be about I do not know.
But it will be about how I’m coping with the loss of my wife and son to cancer in recent years and how I manage with being a coeliac and recovering from a stroke. It will be about travel, sport, engineering, food, art, computers, large projects and London, that are some of the passions that fill my life.
And hopefully, it will get rid of the lonely times, from which I still suffer.
Why Anonymous? That’s how you feel at times.
The Anonymous Widower
For newspapers a quire is 26, but I don’t think that it is used any more. I always assumed that the extra copy was to account for the fact that the bottom copy was often damaged, but I might be wrong. My grandfather, who was a newsagent all his life, could walk his fingers through a large pile of newspapers in 3s and 4s and tell you exactly the correct number of copies. On a couple of occasions, I doubted his abilitly to do it so quickly and so I checked. It took me a lot longer, but he was right! I don’t know if it is still the case, but in those days unsold newspapers could be returned the following day for credit. Everyday he would count all the unslod returns, bind the up with string, ready for collection. On his birthday “many happy returns” had a special meaning for him.
Comment by John Wright | September 5, 2012 |
Quire was 25 in general printing. Sounds like in the newspaper trade it was a bit like a baker’s dozen. I bet he couldn’t have done it with today’s papers as the paper is so difficult to count.
My father could also get the weight of paper correct and could count the number of sheets in one go, by just flicking it through his fingers.
Comment by AnonW | September 5, 2012 |
Yes, another word that has been hijacked by the Social Network Set . . .
Gross . . . Repulsive, Fat, Vulgar etc . . . in common use with kids.
Twelve Dozen . . . er, excuse me, what is a dozen ?
It is great for us Print Age Kids, to reminisce . . . about the days of Printers Ink.
Comment by Steam Lover | September 5, 2012 |