Notebooks in the Attic

Obsolescence is overrated.

When an old technology is eclipsed by a shiny new rival, the old technology, after some years, will often emerge again, in a romantic crescent of its former self. And how sweet its second light can be.

When electric light made gaslight and candles obsolete, it did so profoundly. But after some decades, gaslight came back—in streetlights twinkling along certain brick streets, and in carriage lights in front of occasional homes. And what home doesn’t have candles? How better to see, when we allow our hearts to guide us, than by candlelight?

Up in the attic

Before they can reemerge, however, old technologies must first enter what I call their Attic Period. That’s when we hastily put them out of sight as we rush headlong into the infatuation stage with our new lovers. After some time, when infatuation evolves into habituation, a seeming accident happens. Somebody goes up to the attic, sees something intriguing in a dim corner, blows off the dust, and smiles.

Often it’s younger people who make the rediscovery. Since they grew up with, and therefore take for granted, the technologies that amazed their elders, their fresh eyes see the old as new. When they add their youthful touch, the old is transformed. Old becomes old school, or vintage or retro, or classic or heirloom or heritage. When these young people proudly show off their new discovery, it can bring a winsome smile to an elder’s face.

Today, thanks to laptops and digital tablets, paper notebooks are already in their Attic Period. I would be more worried if I didn’t understand it was inevitable, and if I didn’t realize that rediscovery is also inevitable.

What’s more, I’m smiling as I write this because I know what the technology cycles can’t: we at Levenger are up in the attic right now with those notebooks—and we’re already designing a stunning renaissance.

Low price, with expectations to match

To see how far paper notebooks might go, it’s helpful to know how they began.

Cheap office supply pad showing this old graphic design

In 20^th-century paper notebooks, the first page was like the last page, and like all the pages in between. These notebooks were bricks of identical paper sheets. No one thought much about it. Not all that much was expected of paper notebooks, everyone had to use them, and the main focus was on making them cheap. Cheap has merit: inexpensive notebooks and other school supplies helped democratize education in America. But few students would have credited their notebooks as sources of inspiration. Most graphic designs used in 20^th-century notebooks and notepads actually came from the 19^th century. Typical designs had anemic blue horizontal rules and a vertical red line down the left side to make a narrow margin. This pattern, an improvement over blank sheets, was invented by an American judge in 1888, and hasn’t changed much since. Production was, and still is, optimized for high volume and low price.

There were some alternatives, such as graph paper, ledger paper, scientific formats, and so on, but these were few. No one gave much thought to how new graphic designs in notebooks might evoke better thinking and results in commonly performed tasks.

But better page formats did gradually emerge.

One simple but shining example took place in the mid-20^th century. Cornell professor Walter Pauk advised his students to prepare for taking class notes by drawing a vertical line on the left side of their notebook sheet to give a margin wide enough to write their own questions. Covering up your notes as you query yourself with your own questions became known as the Cornell System of note-taking.

But why couldn’t paper be printed with this annotation margin to begin with? It could, of course, and was—first by Levenger, so far as I know, and then by others.

Creative comebacks

Decades after Walter Pauk retired, an enterprising Cornell graduate named Scott Belsky founded a company dedicated to helping creative people execute their ideas. His company, Behance, offers mostly online tools, but Scott and his partner, Metias Correa, also designed well-formatted, colorful paper that helped people focus their attention and follow through more thoroughly with Action Steps. Simple and compelling, the Behance pages gently guide and reward 21^st-century users in delightful new ways.

Behance also improved the idea of a grid of faint, gray dots, which combines the benefits of graph paper with the freedom of blank paper. The elegant execution of this dot grid provides a surprisingly flexible tool for today’s note-takers.

A completely different way to make paper more productive is by making the paper itself irresistibly luscious to write on. A venerable French company named Clairefontaine has been doing this for years. Combine this fine paper and its distinctive purple ink with the Levenger annotation margin design, and you have silky sheets begging for the liquid ink of a fountain pen (another attic find that young people continue to dust off).

There are shaded papers, which for some reason are especially pleasing to write on, and To-Do sheets, and ingenious page formats that help facilitate the discovery of novel solutions. 

Under the radar

The big breakthrough in paper notebooks is not any one particular type of page, but rather, the idea that notebooks could, and should, contain different types of sheets from which to choose. This profound change requires both the flexibility of disc-bound notebooks, which allow effortless removal and reinsertion of pages, and a renaissance in paper design.

How ironic: just at the point that, superficially at least, paper notebooks are being made obsolete by digital devices, at Levenger they are experiencing a creative explosion of their own. Perhaps the attic door is already cracking open.

As a historical parallel, we can look to the advent of jet aviation. In the early 1950s, jet engines spawned the Jet Age and predictions that turbo jets would power all our flying, just as nuclear power would provide all our energy needs. Yet 70 years later, prop planes are still flying. They have proved themselves more nimble at low speeds, able to use plentiful, inexpensive airstrips, and as float planes on remote mountain lakes. They are more practical and pleasing for the world of flying that hums under the canopy of high-altitude jets.

An inheritance ready to enjoy now

Digital tablets and smartphones open whole new avenues of human creativity. They can’t be beat for being social, for sharing photos and videos, for being connected to the massive intelligence of the hive. But they enable only part of our human abilities.

Paper notebooks are better for communicating with oneself, superior at enabling quiet reflection and tranquil concentration.

The Attic Period can be seen as a forlorn time, when a former champion is relegated to the shadows. But it can also be a blessing.

When the world no longer depends on a particular technology for everything, when the pressure is off, that technology can recharge and collect itself in the loving hands of its caretakers. What are its inherent strengths? What might it become? What changes elsewhere in the world can be hybridized with it in order to create something at once old and new?

This is what’s happening to paper now—and not just paper notebooks, but paper pads, paper cards, new paper formats, and, of course, paper books. (As Harvard professor Leah Price noted in her essay for The New York Times Book Review, “Every generation rewrites the [paper] book’s epitaph; all that changes is the whodunit.”

Paper is among the most important technologies ever invented. Together with the invention of writing and printing, paper—in the form of notebooks, letters, articles, blueprints and books—has enabled all further technological development and what we know as civilization.

I smile at the thought of young people traipsing up the attic stairs—a bit weary of social networks and mandatory sharing, knowing there is more they can do with their hands than point and click. They will pick up a thoughtfully designed paper notebook and know it’s meant to be private, and want to put their own stamp on it.

The door to the attic is already opening, and what the young people will find is not a dark place but a well-lit loft, full of new kinds of notebooks ready to be individualized—ready for the next steps in imagination that they will provide.

As is true of our planet, we don’t own the heritage technologies we are given; we borrow them from our children.

And now, dear reader, it’s your turn to add your reflections—for it’s time to be social. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you’ll connect to Comments).

Comments

[Marc Newman]

I would love to have the Levenger paper designs licensed for use by individuals (I can't read my own writing!) who would make use of the newer technology (tablets, ipads, iphones and laptops) with the ability to transfer the printed word onto the many and beautiful sheets of the Levenger collection!

I love working with your products and look forward to more attic relics becoming part and parcel of my life...I have loved revisiting and using the fountain pen thanks to your many different possibilities!

[Pamela Keown]

Thank you for your paper and your 3x5 cards I love to write on so much I can on longer tolerate mass-market index cards. Long-live-Levenger!

[R. Estep]

This article reminded me of another form of paper that's popular today, and that's the Scrapbook specialty papers available in many stores. Taken together with trips to the attic, people are bringing back memories and articles of the past and putting them into their own creative designs, possibly bringing 'other' old technologies back to revival.
...
Yes, you can not beat the old paper & pen/pencil feel.

[Patricia Burnett]

What a lovely history lesson.It is nice to hear from other paper users; sometimes one does feel like an old relic next to the shiny mobile devices. I love both paper and the electronoc devices and have found a place for both in my life.

[Charles Berolzheimer]

Yes, this is a very similar trend to what we're experiencing with younger people rediscovering what writing and drawing are like when using a distinctive wood-cased pencil such as the Palomino Blackwing. These and other high quality pencils are not what they experienced with the average yellow hex pencil of their school days that have been increasingly marginalized from a quality perspective over time, just as your standard paper pad and school notebook paper have been. Writing with a great pencil is even becoming cool again, and even a welcome break from using their digital devices.

When a great writing instrument is paired with an excellent individualized paper notebook, sketchbook or pad produced from great materials as you've described, I feel both inspiration and creative experience as a whole can be much more fulfilling. Even older people distanced from regular pencil use for many years experience a nostalgic, out of the attic, response to reengaging with a high quality pencil.

[Jim Cassady]

Our adult children are already re-discovering handwritten cards and notes, holiday letters from "Father Christmas" on parchment paper, remembrance books from grandparents and great grandparents...and none of these can be written on tissue paper. These are treasurers to be retained through generations, written by the hand of loved ones, and they deserve quality paper to last through time. I agree that both electronic delivery and paper are important, but watch the face of someone who actually touches the paper on which his or her great grandpaprent wrote.....awesome!

[Katie Rose]

Thank you for the history lesson and the positive discussion about the future of paper (and books - I am a librarian!) in our lives. The concept of the attic gives me a nice comeback for people asking me if the paper book is going away.
Most appreciated.

[Pepe]

For me, nothing beats 3x5 cards for taking and leaving notes. But I really enjoyed the colored cards (esp the blue and gray) Levenger used to offer. Will they be returning?

[Marsha Cosentino]

Through FastCompany.com I read a synopsis of a recent study that relates to Levenger. It's called "Designing Colleges for More Than Just Connectivity." Maddy Burke-Vigeland, architect, conducted studies on campuses to find out where and how students spend their study time.

One of the surprising things she found out about Gens Y/Z was they "ranked pen and paper as the study tools they used most often on campus, followed closely by and in tandem with the laptop and Internet."

No attics for this bunch. They're using pens and notebooks on the ground floor of their lives.