Accounts Ledger Register

Details

A foolscap accounts register, 220 mm by 340 mm, thread sewn in signatures of sixteen pages, cased onto 2.5 mm board with a cotton cloth spine and cloth corners. A ledger is not a notebook and the difference is not decoration. It has to stay legible for the whole retention period, which for tax records in India runs to roughly eight years, and it has to be tamper evident, which means a page cannot be removed and replaced without leaving a hole in the numbering. Both of those are quietly abandoned in the market. Registers are perfect bound, so any leaf lifts out cleanly with a blade and a fresh one glues back in. Pages are printed unnumbered, so nobody would know. And the paper is 58 to 60 GSM sold as 70, which strikes through badly enough that the reverse side becomes unusable, halving a book you paid for by the page.

• 192 pages is 96 leaves in 12 signatures. 288 pages is 144 leaves in 18. 384 pages is 192 leaves in 24. All divide by 16 exactly. A page is one side and a leaf is one sheet, both printed here
• Counted against the cover figure on a sample from every lot. A register that is short by a signature is a rejected lot
• Every page carries a printed page number in the outer corner, sequential from 1, so a missing leaf is visible by looking at the numbers
• Thread sewn, rounded and backed, cloth spine and corners over 2.5 mm board. It opens flat across the gutter, which is what lets you rule a line right across a double spread
• Text paper measures 80 GSM to ISO 536 on a disc cut from the bound book, tolerance plus or minus 3 percent. Opacity 92 percent to ISO 2471, so both sides of a leaf are usable in ink
• Acid free, pH 7.5 to 9, alkaline buffered with a calcium carbonate reserve, to ISO 9706. That is the specification for permanent paper, and it is the one that decides whether an entry is still readable at the end of a retention period
• Elemental chlorine free, AOX under 0.2 kg per tonne of pulp. ECF is not chlorine free and this store will not round that up
• Virgin fibre. Recycled fibre is a worse choice here, because recovered stock carries shorter fibres and a lower folding endurance, and a register is opened and closed for years
• Ruled and column printed for double entry, with a bound-in ruling key on the first leaf
• No perforation anywhere in the book. A perforated ledger page is a ledger page designed to come out