The paper size will date a document to within a decade

③ The paper itself

In an office with carbon paper, the colour of the sheet is the filing system. This is the detail that makes a document prop read as used rather than printed.

Stock	What it was for
Bond 80	White office bond — the default typing sheet.
Bank 45	Thin airmail bank: what the carbon copy is typed on.
Wove 100 · Laid 100	Better stationery. Laid has chain and laid lines — the paper a solicitor writes on.
Buff manila	The file cover and the government form.
Grey utility	Wartime and austerity stock — recycled, grey, coarse.
Pink flimsy	The third copy. Pink meant a different department.
Blue flimsy	The second copy, or the duplicate book.
Green ledger	Accounts paper, feint ruled.
Cream laid 120	Certificates and letters of appointment.
Cheap news	Handbills and wanted bills — printed to be pasted up and lost.
Continuous fanfold	Tractor-feed listing paper with sprocket margins and green bar. Mainframe output: not before the 1960s, gone by the late 1990s.

Carbons are not photocopies. A carbon copy is typed through — the letters are grey-violet and slightly spread, the signature is absent (or traced), and the sheet is thinner. A photocopy of the period has a platen border and lost midtones. They are not interchangeable, and a close-up will tell.

⑤ Five markets in English, and six more beyond them

The layout is only half of it. A document is written in the register of its office, and that register is national.

• Britain. Foolscap to the 1970s; Dear Sir / Yours faithfully when unnamed, Dear Mr Hale / Yours sincerely when named; the reference line (Our ref / Your ref) above the date; the date as 14th March 1955.
• France. Papier ministre, then A4; the objet line; the formula of politeness at the end that runs to a full sentence; the date as le 14 mars 1955; francs to 2001 — and remember the nouveau franc of 1960, which divides every earlier figure by a hundred.
• Germany. A4 from the twenties; the Impressum or the Geschäftsangaben at the foot; DIN 5008 conventions for the address block; the date as 14. März 1955.
• Italy. Lire to 2001 with the L. prefix; the Prot. n. protocol number on anything official; the date as 14 marzo 1955.
• Spain. Pesetas to 2001; the date as 14 de marzo de 1955; the formulaic Muy señor mío opening.
• Greece. Καθαρεύουσα in official documents well past the point where the press had moved on; polytonic accents until 12 January 1982; Αρ. Πρωτ. as the protocol number; drachmas to 2002.

Money changes underfoot. The nouveau franc (1960), the lira’s scale, the drachma, the peseta and the euro changeover of 1 January 2002 all move the numbers on a document by orders of magnitude. A rent figure that would be unremarkable in 1975 francs is absurd in 1955 francs.

⑦ What dates a document fastest

• The sheet. Foolscap before about 1970 in Britain; Kanzleibogen before the 1920s on the continent; US Letter from 1921; fanfold with sprocket holes between the 1960s and the late 1990s.
• The machine. Typewriter to the 1980s, daisywheel into the eighties, dot-matrix from the late seventies, laser from 1985 onward. A proportional-spaced letter before the mid-eighties is a red flag.
• The money. Old francs before 1960, pre-decimal sterling before 15 February 1971, national currencies before 1 January 2002.
• The accents, in Greek: polytonic before 1982, and καθαρεύουσα in officialdom for longer than in the press.
• The telephone number. Letter exchanges in Britain to 1968; national numbering plans change underneath every market at datable moments.
• The postcode. Britain’s full alphanumeric code rolls out 1959–1974; the German five-digit code dates from 1993, not before.

⑧ The continent before A4

The British office sheet was foolscap folio, 203 × 330 mm, until metrication. The continental one was the Kanzleibogen in Germany and the papier ministre in France, and the two are within a few millimetres of each other at about 220 × 340 mm — noticeably taller and a little wider than A4, which is what makes a pre-war continental letter look wrong on a modern sheet. Folded once it gives the continental quarto, 220 × 170, which is the receipt, the short note and the delivery docket.

DIN 476 was published in 1922 and A4 displaces both from the 1920s in German offices, across the rest of Europe after the war, and in Britain only from about 1970. So the decade in which a market went metric is itself a dating instrument, and it is a different decade in every one of them.

⑨ The suffix at the foot of the letterhead

A legal form is a fact about company law, and company law has dates. It is the sharpest thing on any letterhead and it is different in every market. What follows is what the studio will and will not offer for a given year.

Market	Form, and the year it became possible
Germany	OHG 1861 (the Allgemeines Deutsches Handelsgesetzbuch) · KG 1861 · AG 1870, when free incorporation came with the Aktienrechtsnovelle · GmbH 1892 — the law of 20 April 1892, the first private limited company anywhere and the model half of Europe copied · UG 2008, the one-euro GmbH of the MoMiG reform
France	S.A. 1867, when the law of 24 July ended the need for state authorisation · Éts 1850, in front of the name and the mark of a works rather than a shop · S.A.R.L. 1925, modelled on the German GmbH · S.A.S. 1994, opened to a single shareholder in 1999 and the ordinary French form since
Italy	S.A. 1882–1942 only — the società anonima of the commercial code, and it stops · S.p.A. and S.r.l. both 1942, created by the Codice Civile; on a pre-war letterhead an S.p.A. is wrong · S.r.l.s. 2012 · F.lli for fratelli, in front of the name · & C., one letter shorter than the English, and the tell
Spain	S.A. 1885, the Código de Comercio · S.L. 1953 · Hijos de and Sucesores de in front of the founder’s name, which is how a Spanish firm marked a succession · y Cía
Greece	Α.Ε. and Ο.Ε. 1920 — law 2190 of 1920, which is the whole of Greek company law for the next eighty years · Ε.Π.Ε. 1955, law 3190, and not available before it · Ι.Κ.Ε. 2012 · Υιοί in front of the name to about 1980, in the katharevousa spelling; a demotic firm writes Γιοι · Αφοί for Αδελφοί
Pan-European	SE — Societas Europaea, Council Regulation 2157/2001, available from 8 October 2004. A firm that wanted to look European rather than national.

And the commonest case of all: no suffix. Most firms in most decades had none, and a letterhead without one reads older than one with.

⑩ The small furniture, market by market

Market	The date	The money, and the word in front of the number
Germany	12. März 1954 full stop after the day	M to 1923, RM 1924–47, DM 1948–2001, € after, decimal comma throughout · Fernruf before 1960, Telefon after
France	12 mars 1954, and 1er for the first of the month	Francs to 2001, the nouveau franc of 1960 knocking two noughts off · Téléphone
Italy	12 marzo 1954	Lire, always whole · Telefono
Spain	12 de marzo de 1954	Pesetas, whole · Teléfono
Greece	12 Μαρτίου 1954 the month in the genitive	Δρχ. to 2001 — and the revaluation of 1954 knocked three noughts off, which is a second break nobody else has · Τηλέφωνον in katharevousa to 1976, Τηλέφωνο after

Two rules that cut across all of them. Every market writes the date out in words until about 1960 and in figures after it, which is a change of office habit rather than of law. And from 2005 the word in front of a telephone number collapses to a bare T in every language at once — the one piece of letterhead furniture that went the same way everywhere.

⑪ Greece has documents no other market has

The Greek forms in this studio are not translations of the English ones. They are different documents, prescribed field by field by the Code of Criminal Procedure, and they are offered only when the sheet is Greek.

• Άρθρο 276 ΚΠΔ — the ένταλμα συλλήψεως: the examining magistrate issues it only with the prosecutor’s concurring opinion, and it carries the name, the residence, the most exact description possible, the act with its article, a seal and two signatures — the magistrate’s and the clerk’s.
• The κλητήριο θέσπισμα is issued by the prosecutor, not the judge, and the law fixes eight elements it must contain.
• The κλήση μάρτυρα (Άρθρο 213) must be served at least twenty-four hours in advance and must state the consequences of non-appearance — a fine and forcible attendance.

The criminal code itself is a date. The Ποινικός Κώδιξ and the Κώδιξ Ποινικής Δικονομίας both took effect on 1 January 1951. A sheet from before that is under the codes of 1834, whose article numbering could not be sourced — so the studio names the statute and describes the provision rather than quoting an article it cannot verify, which is also how those documents commonly read.

And the language. The reform everybody remembers is Ν. 309/1976, and for a court file it is the wrong one: it made demotic the language of education, from the 1976–77 school year, and did not touch the courts. Judicial and police paperwork went on being written in polytonic katharevousa for another six years. The monotonic decision of 23 November 1981 took effect with Π.Δ. 297/1982 and changed the script only; Ν. 1406/1983 brought demotic into the judiciary, and only then does the language of a warrant change. The middle window, 1982–83, is monotonic katharevousa, and it is the one nobody gets right.

The state in the top line is a weaker instrument than it looks: ΒΑΣΙΛΕΙΟΝ ΤΗΣ ΕΛΛΑΔΟΣ to 1923 and again 1935–1973, ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΗ ΔΗΜΟΚΡΑΤΙΑ in between and after, so the line alone never dates a sheet — it only rules out the wrong half-century. The force does better: two ran side by side for sixty-three years, split by town and country, so a village in 1955 is Χωροφυλακή and Athens the same year is Αστυνομία Πόλεων. Neither may appear after 1984, and ΕΛ.ΑΣ. never before it.