Books are heavy enough…

kw: observations

I finished one book, and picked up the next one I planned to read. It seemed twice as heavy, but only little larger. The latter book is all in color drawings, a kind of graphic novel. This piqued my interest, so I weighed the books: 485g and 890g, nearly twice the weight, after all.

Other parameters (oh, this is getting obsessive) included dimensions of the paper stacks and of the covers. The raw density of the heavier book is 1.4x the lighter one. Then I did more figuring to compensate for covers (assumed the same density as the lighter book), and I find the density of the paper stack in the heavier book is 0.92 g/cc, versus 0.61 g/cc, or 1.5x.

The calendering process that makes paper take up printing inks on their surface rather than having it seep through adds clay to the paper. Clay is dense, ergo calendered paper is also dense, and now I know by how much. I suspect that super-calendered paper used in shiny coffee-table picture books is even denser. I don't have one handy to measure. But this also illustrates the incredible mass of a large collection of photo-journals such as National Geographic.