Issue 01 · The Sales Pitch · Brochures & Manuals

Paper Stock and the Feel of Money

The single clearest signal of what a car cost is not in the photography. It is in the weight and finish of the sheet it was printed on.

Grammage is a price signal

Paper weight is measured in grams per square metre. Ordinary office paper is eighty. A mid-market car brochure of the sixties ran to about one hundred and fifty. A Rolls-Royce or Bentley catalogue could be two hundred and fifty or heavier, which is card rather than paper.

Nobody was told this and everybody registered it. Weight in the hand reads as substance, and the manufacturers understood the association perfectly. Pick up two brochures blind and you can rank the cars.

Coated, uncoated and the matt revival

A coated sheet has a mineral layer applied to it, which stops ink soaking in and sitting flat. Colours are brighter, detail is sharper, and the surface reflects. Most colour brochures from the sixties onward are coated because photography demanded it.

Uncoated stock absorbs ink and softens everything. It cannot hold a glossy photograph and it feels warm and slightly rough. It was used for utility material and for anything wanting to look honest rather than glamorous, which is why Land Rover material of the period often reads as deliberately plain.

Then in the eighties matt coated stock arrived, which combines the sharpness of coating with a non-reflective surface, and the premium end moved to it almost immediately. Gloss started to read as cheap. It largely still does.

The finishes that cost real money

Spot varnish, where a gloss layer is applied only to part of the page, appears on the car and nowhere else. It costs an extra pass on the press and it makes the vehicle sit forward off the sheet.

Foil blocking, embossing and die cutting all required tooling made specially for that print run, which is why they appear on flagships and almost never on volume models. A blind emboss of a marque badge on the cover of a catalogue is a decision that cost more than the photography on page four.

Tipped-in plates, where a separate sheet of better paper is glued into the binding, were borrowed straight from art book publishing. They are rare, expensive and a reliable sign that somebody was taking the object very seriously indeed.

Why it matters when buying

Paper condition is most of the value in old motoring print. Coated stock is vulnerable to moisture, and once the coating has cockled it can never be flattened. Uncoated stock foxes and browns but stays flat.

Check the gutter and the corners first, because that is where handling shows. Then hold the sheet up to a window: a brochure stored damp will show a tide line long before it shows any visible stain in normal light.

The advice most often given, which is to buy the best condition you can afford, is even more true here than it is in books. There is no restoration for cockled coated paper.

Duncan Ashby, January 2026

Next piece: The Exploded Diagram