Do you ISO or do I?

Found out some­thing truly fas­ci­nat­ing today when I perused a knowl­edge lid­bit (which is slightly more than a tid­bit) con­cern­ing what the dimen­sions of a piece A4 paper is. Come to find out, stan­dard paper sizes are based on a sin­gle aspect ratio of the square root of 2 or [√2 = 1:1.4142] The way to fig­ure out dimen­sions is to fold an A4 size piece of paper in half, do it again, again, again… ad infini­tum. Wikipedia puts the expla­na­tion of paper siz­ing stan­dards thusly: “The main advan­tage of this sys­tem is its scal­ing: if a sheet with an aspect ratio of √2 is divided into two equal halves par­al­lel to its short­est sides, then the halves will again have an aspect ratio of √2.”

ISO paper sizes. A is most com­mon, B fol­lows, and C brings up the pulp rear. Oh, I do love me some square roots. They’s hard to find, though, most of the gin­ger we dug up was roundish. Reminds me of Granny Leg­less who used to tell us “corn­bread are square. Pie are round.”

Squar­ing is so fluxus. Round­ing out? Not a chance.

Accord­ing to Wikipedia, again, C is only used for envelopes. But I have found another size C func­tion — match­books. The stan­dard match­book is 2.2″ x 3.25″, accord­ing to the Atlas Match LLC web­site. (Betcha’ thought them blue words was links, din’t ‘cha?)

Want to fig­ure out the dimen­sions of your B or C ISO paper?

Read this and weep:

The C series is used only for envelopes and is defined in ISO 269. The area of C series sheets is the geo­met­ric mean of the areas of the A and B series sheets of the same num­ber; for instance, the area of a C4 sheet is the geo­met­ric mean of the areas of an A4 sheet and a B4 sheet. This means that C4 is slightly larger than A4, and B4 slightly larger than C4. The prac­ti­cal usage of this is that a let­ter writ­ten on A4 paper fits inside a C4 enve­lope, and a C4 enve­lope fits inside a B4 envelope.

We’re seri­ously con­sid­er­ing print­ing Dead Mule School of South­ern Lit­er­a­ture match­books. Then, in 2035, the match­books will be vin­tage and we

That lobot­omy sure worked swell, Bob.

can sell them and make a gabillion-​trillion dol­lars US. Now I won­der if the Dead Mule could be the ISO stan­dard for lit­er­ary excellence?

The lat­est col­lage with vin­tage match­books required the removal of the dead/​flattened matches them­selves. It can’t be good to leave flam­ma­bles in my art, although that is a rather inter­est­ing con­cept — a visual feast for the ears. Lis­ten to what I see, you won’t believe your eyes. One of my altered books required small wooden dow­els (are sticks still dow­els if they’re square? Is there an ISO for sticks?) so I cut the ends off wooden match­sticks, glued them together in a row (think South Pacific island raft) and then cre­ated the desired effect with paint and chicken giz­zards. It seems noth­ing else can achieve the effect you get from a dozen chicken giz­zards. A rare artis­ti­cal moment, truly inspiring.

I took some ART lessons from Juanita down to the gas sta­tion. She was well-​versed in chicken col­lages, made assem­blages, 3-​D as well as two dimen­sional pieces that sold for nigh over $2,500.00 a pop. But the sad thing is, the classes ended before we’d been taught as to how to attach a giz­zard in a func­tional man­ner so’s I had to come up with my own recipe for a good, stiff chicken glue. Tried ox blood with Elmers, PVA com­bined with apple cider vine­gar and tooth­picks … after 17 years of exper­i­men­ta­tion, it turned out Armour Star Lard worked best of any­thing. And there began a whole new set of prob­lems on account of Daddy Leg­less has these seven bea­gles what have a pen­chant for lard-​related art and they ate my assemblages.

Nowa­days, I tend to use only vin­tage match­books when fil­ing my nails or tend­ing the herds.

Strike it rich.

Strike a match.

Strike out on your own.