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Most paper has what we call a "grain direction"; it used to be thought that the grain direction was due to paper fibers being aligned in that direction in the paper-making process, but current thinking is that it is more strongly related to what tension the paper was under as it dried. Handmade papers which were dried between felts often do not have a pronounced grain direction.

When a paper does have a pronounced grain direction, as most modern machine-made papers do, it will bend or fold more easily with the grain than across it. If you dampen one side of such a paper, it will curl into a tube with the grain. Most commercial papers are sold "grain long" -- that is, the grain runs the long way, from top to bottom on the sheet. (Putting these things together, if you take a sheet of commercial US printer paper and dampen it on one side, it'll curl up with the grain, resulting in an 11-inch-long tube.)

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13y ago

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