Well-Read Life™

Why I’m Glad Staples Knocked Us Off

The day I walked into Staples and saw their knockoffs, a cold shiver went down my spine. There, on a long section of aisle, were what looked just like Levenger Circa notebooks. Sitting propped up at a nice angle were our leather covers, our dividers, extra discs for enlarging notebooks, even our wide-column paper formats with our miniature illustrations of the various paper options. “Slavish” was the word that came into my head. They had slavishly copied Levenger, not even bothering to pretend that they had come up with anything original. They did what big-box stores tend to do: find innovation in the marketplace, make it cheaper, make lots of it, and blow it out the door.

Of course I thought about suing Staples. I mean, come on! Even our page formats? Plenty of customers who had also seen the products reached out to us. They asked, “Are you selling in Staples now?”

But we didn’t sue Staples. I knew too much. First off, they had more lawyers. And second, the original design for what can generically be called disc-bound notebooks was patented in Belgium in 1946.

When I saw my first disc-bound notebook, it was a little item with the brand Atoma. I saw it at a pen show, some 25 years ago. It was all plastic and kind of cheap. But the revolutionary idea was there.

Consider conventional three-ring notebooks: You pry the thing open, exposing ragged metal prongs, remove a sheet, close the rings with a finger-pinching thwack, pry it open again to put the sheet somewhere else, and snap the contraption closed again. Forcing inherently strong metal to open up and then chomp back down again is a bad idea that, like a bad gene, keeps replicating down through the generations.

The fundamentally different idea in disc-bound notebooks is to take advantage of the inherent flexibility of paper to bend easily when in a single sheet, yet be strong when united together. It’s a kind of Zen approach to notebooks.

After seeing my first disc-bound notebook back at the pen show, I went hunting the world for more examples. At the international stationery show in Frankfurt, my merchandising group and I found versions from Israel, Brazil, India, Europe, and the UK. Each had slightly different spacing of the discs and different page sizes, but it was clear the idea had traveled around the world. Yet while it had gone a long way geographically, in another way, the idea had stalled out.

In all the renditions we saw, the notebooks were trying to compete with existing, inexpensive wire notebooks sold around the world. The disc-bound notebooks were better, yes, but their parts and assembly made them inherently more expensive to make. Since the largest market worldwide is for low-cost notebooks, the innovation foundered on the rocks of conventional thinking.

But Levenger was, and still is, an oddball company in the stationery world. We sell to lawyers, engineers, teachers, scientists, doctors, professors, writers—professional people of all types whom we sometimes refer to as the hyperliterate. Our customers read and write for their livings—and typically for pleasure, too. They look to Levenger for high-quality tools of their trade. So we had a different mission than companies that had tried to sell disc-bound notebooks in the past. Ours was not to make them as inexpensive as possible in a vain effort to compete with conventional low-cost notebooks. Our mission was to see how good we could make them. How beautiful could these kinds of notebooks be, both in their function and their looks? First we would build it, and then see if they would come.

Build a Better Notebook

The first thing we did was reunite paper with its longtime friend and fellow naturalist, leather. Then we upgraded the discs. We realized they didn’t have to be plastic. We made them out of aluminum, instead—lightweight, strong, and handsome in the variety of colors we introduced. We found that the pages also turned more easily over polished aluminum, “high-speed” discs.

Finally, we improved the paper: not just the feel and performance of the paper, but the graphic layouts of pages as well.

Facing the increasing competition from digital devices, we felt an obligation to see how good paper notebooks could become. How fast and how far could paper notebooks evolve?

Thanks to thinkers like Paul Saffo and Kevin Kelly, we were aware of a pattern of technological change: that not all old technologies go away when they are obsolete. Candles are obsolete as a lighting source, yet they continue to evolve. What home or romantic dinner is complete without them?

Bicycles are another of my favorite examples of this pattern. Made obsolete a century ago by cars and motorcycles, human-powered bikes continue to evolve into ever more specialized and delightful forms.

Yet who was doing this with the paper notebook? Paper is obsolete for big data, but who doesn’t still want notebook pages to fill with inspired thought? Around our conference table, we would ask ourselves, “What company will do this if not us?”

A latte grande you can write on

Periodically, journalists would pen articles about the paperless office, often predicted, yet always just off on the horizon. Sometimes they would call me for interviews and I’d quote Steve Jobs: “The easiest way to predict the future is to invent it.” So while Silicon Valley was reinventing telephones and countless other digital devices, we were laboring over new paper notebooks.

The good news: Our expensive Circa notebooks took off. Bless our customers who would pay for better function and looks. Who says notebooks could cost only $1.99? Starbucks didn’t think coffee had to be 99 cents. And just as customers drank up the affordable luxury of a Starbucks latte, they turned with pleasure the pages of Circa notebooks from Levenger.

Staples noticed.

When they launched, they also did hip videos and social media. Clearly, they were serious about making this a significant part of their business. We felt the impact right away. Our sales went down. Then Office Depot and other notebook makers got on the disc-bound notebook parade. Martha Stewart, who had praised the Levenger notebooks on one of her platforms, liked them so much she made her own.

Our CFO was alarmed. “Shouldn’t we go after them?”

But then something else happened. Our sales started to grow again. It seemed that some people who were introduced to disc-bound notebooks at their local big-box store somehow found out about Levenger and upgraded.

Instead of suing Staples and the other followers, we wrote the words of Walt Disney on the whiteboard: “We can invent faster than they can copy.”

When innovative companies come up with better products and big players copy them at lower prices, customers win. It’s what’s supposed to happen when capitalism works well. And in the spirit of Conscious Capitalism, I salute Staples, Office Depot, Martha Stewart, and the rest of the players who copied Levenger. For they all have helped spread this advancement in heritage technology to millions of new people who would not have found it otherwise.

Editor’s note: Steve writes more about candles, bicycles, and Circa in his quasi-memoir, Holding Dear: The Value of the Real.

Ten COOL staff picks for holiday presents

Who wants to know what the CEO thinks are Levenger’s top 10 presents for Christmas? Not me, particularly. But I do want to know what our knowledgeable staff thinks are the tops because they actually know. So I asked them, and then added my own two cents, to bring you this inside information in time for the holidays:

 Best of Both Technologies

1.      Our iPad Mini Travel Case stores iPad Mini, smartphone, earbuds and power cord in a slender leather pouch that’s no bigger than a Kindle (which it can also hold). Coolness: It comes with a lining made of microfiber that cleans your screen while you do nothing.

2.      With our Work & Play iPad Folio, digital technology gets even more useful because you mix it with heritage technology. 

It puts notepad (a Levenger one, included, so you’ll get spoiled) and iPad side by side. Coolness:  the Bomber Jacket leather, which will also spoil you.  

3. Tap your screen with one end of our L-Tech Plus Fountain Pen with Stylus and ink a note with the other. The L-Tech is one of the few hybrids to pair a stylus with a fine writing instrument. Coolness: Are you kidding? A fountain pen and a stylus?? Yes, hold two centuries of writing technology in your hand. Both forms are really good.

  Heritage Technology

4.      Our Facets Pen has been a hit this year, proving that plenty of people still covet a beautiful new old pen, like this with its unending helix. Coolness: You can put Pilot G2 refills in this, which really expands how it can write—gels, colors, whatever. (This is a little known fact about all Levenger rollerball pens.)  

5.      Our Bomber Jacket Desk Set  takes aim at the virtual with rich and textured leather Coolness: Give your fingertips a break from the glass screen and let them linger on this storied leather.

  Smart Stuff

6.      Our Stealth Laptop Messenger is streamlined and roomy at the same time. It’s just the kind of all-in-one that guys love. Stow a laptop, an iPad and a Kindle all in the same smooth leather bag. Coolness: Solves typical messenger bag hangup by putting two zipper pockets in the foldover flap.

7.      Levenger elves have stocked our Bloomsbury Bookbag with a cache of reading tools. A perennial favorite, just a bit different this year. Coolness: This stocking is pre-stuffed.

8.      Our 2014 Circa smartPlanner  surprised even us with its brisk sales, which go to show that plenty of people still want a paper calendar. Comes with a bunch of paper apps that readily customize your agenda. I dig the bright thick paper. Coolness: a tiny perforated corner you can tear off and announce “Done!” Can’t do that on Outlook.

Bookending

9.      To commemorate this anniversary year of the Gettysburg Address, we created a Civil War train engine to bookend your books. Coolness: We made it authentic with the help of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum.

10.  In 1610 Galileo published The Starry Messenger and forever changed the course of scientific thinking. We thought it was about time to bring it back. Our eminently giftable facsimile edition contains the rare copy of the original that the Library of Congress owns. This Levenger Press edition is scholarship made accessible and beautiful, and it’s not in the bookstores. Coolness: When I visited the Library of Congress to see some of the rare books we might develop into facsimiles, the curator said, “Would you like to see your books?” They are your books, too—it’s America’s library, after all. But it’s more convenient to buy this lovingly produced facsimile to keep in your home.

Want more? Click on our helpful Gift Guide. And let our Customer Service team know if we can help. Cheers!

Tell me what you hold dear

Special message to all who commented on this blog through May 19 (thank you!). We have selected six winners of our Holding Dear contest (see the announcement on our Facebook page). But we were so moved by these many entries, we wanted to find a way to thank each one of you. So I would like to extend to all who sent in their story this special offer. If you would like to purchase a copy of Holding Dear, take $10 off the purchase price, May 21 through May 27. (This applies to new purchases only.) Just enter code HDBLOG at checkout. Click here to go to the Holding Dear page. With my thanks, best wishes, and admiration. —Steve

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When I show friends our L-Tech fountain pen and stylus, I like to tell them that they’re holding three centuries of technology in their hand—the 19^th century fountain pen nib, the 20^th century machine-age brass barrel, and the 21^st century silicone stylus tip. Then I like to watch the smile that comes over their faces, as they think about what an old—and new—object they’re holding.

One object, three centuries

This three-century object manifests for me just how lucky we are to be able to tap into such a broad spectrum of technology. I love the feel of the fountain pen as it glides on my paper with the lubrication of liquid ink. In a quiet room, you can hear it, as well as feel it. (Charles Frazier, in his book Cold Mountain, described that sound as the scritch of the pen.) The ink glistens for a few seconds before it permeates the paper with its deep, dark blue.

Then I’ll cap the pen, flip it upside down, and use the stylus to draw on my favorite writing program, 51 Paper. I have a notebook therein where I practice writing, in Spanish, the expressions I read in English. It’s a modern and quite pleasing chalk slate. Bliss!

Now that we can enjoy fountains pens, ballpoints, and digital styli, why would we want to give any of them up?

In the era of virtual, still physical

It’s not just a matter of sentimentality; it speaks to our productivity. For connectivity, breaking news, and immediate communication, you can’t beat digital. But for communication with yourself, nothing beats the quiet pleasures of pen on paper—especially a pen perfectly suited to your hand and writing style, and paper, like an untouched field of fresh snow.

The digital—the virtual—will take us ever farther and higher into the cloud. It’s exciting to speculate on how we will work and create in ways we can’t yet imagine. Yet we are physical beings still, living in a physical world.

Consider the solidity of a strong wooden desk under your arms. It holds your computer ever so steady. Or the touch of a leather case that warmly and securely embraces your smartphone. It is carrying on the long tradition of using leather to give our fragile human bodies purchase on life—shoes, saddles, reins, quivers to hold our arrows.

Now that the heritage technologies we used to construct our civilization—like printed books, notebooks, and ink pens—are technically obsolete, we are free to truly understand their benefits and choose to use them when we desire.

A $100 gift card for the best stories of what you still hold dear

For my new book, Holding Dear: The Value of the Real, I was able to ask some of our customers about the physical object that inspires their thinking and creating. We’ve reproduced some wonderful—and surprising—stories by David McCullough, David Allen, Patti Smith, Ann Patchett and others. I especially liked our technologist friends Paul Saffo and Kevin Kelly weighing in on the analog objects of their affection.

But a book, in its paper iteration, has a finite number of pages, and we need to continue the conversation.

So I’m asking you to share a story with me. Tell me, dear reader, about a favorite box, or a certain painting, or a prized volume of poetry inscribed by a loved one that just wouldn’t be the same as a digital book, no more than a photo of people hugging substitutes for a real hug. Or whatever your object may be.

What thing, when you touch it, touches you back?

For the best stories (in our terribly subjective judgment) that we receive between now and May 19, a $100 Levenger gift card awaits. It’s good for acquiring other objects you hold dear.

Post your story as a Comment to this blog

Just click on the Comments link below with your story. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

We’ll notify the winners by email and announce them on our Facebook page. (Fyi—we may want to share your story in our social media or other Levenger communications channels.)

Gift card or not, each of you will be rewarded as you think back about what physical object you’re grateful for in our increasingly virtual world.

With thanks and gratitude to you, I am

Ever yours,

Steve

 

Best 12 tech gifts from Levenger, and why they’re doubly good

It’s the holidays, so forgive me as I swing into full Merchant Mode. But I just have to tell you why I’m excited about technology gifts from Levenger that give you more. We call them BOB-Tech, which is our shorthand for Best-of-Both Technologies: thoughtful marriages of high and heritage technology, where electronics come together with the venerable technologies of paper, pen or textile, to work smarter for you.

On the high tech side: the power to search, explore, share. On the heritage tech side: the invitation to reflect, immerse, contemplate. As important as it is to connect and be social, it’s also vital to disconnect and be personal. We use our brains best when we do both. This is the digital life that Levenger is committed to bringing you.

So here are my favorite BOB-Tech gifts that I think will help bring out the best in you and your loved ones:

A stylus fit for pen connoisseurs. The result of a year of serious R&D gave birth to our hefty L-Tech stylus pen. It plays both ends of the digital domain beautifully. One end is a replaceable stylus for your tablet or iPhone. The other is a fine writing instrument of your choice—fountain pen, rollerball or the smaller, sleeker, yet still weighty ballpoint.

Passport and iPhone 5 at the ready. Customers have pinned 5 stars on our Pocket Briefcases with their 3x5 note cards since the last century. Our new International Phone-Pocket version holds an iPhone 5 (and earlier models), a passport, plus those ever-handy cards for instant hard copy.

Lab book meets iPad, in leather. In this luscious folio, the familiar composition/laboratory notebook gets a high-Q facelift with archival-quality paper that’s sewn in for greater durability. In the accordion pouch goes your iPad, Nook or Kindle.

Bomber Jacket mission: shield your iPad. Rugged Bomber Jacket leather means plenty of pleasing padding for your iPad, plus room for a small notepad.

See, scroll, write: eyeglasses, smartphone, pen. Our Blink & Ink Phone Holder holds all three of these important, often interdependent, tools. (And yes, the iPhone 5 fits.)

The case for a larger phone case (to fit some notes, of course). The iPhone 5 fits here as well, with room to spare for some 3x5 note cards and pen. The Bomber Jacket leather is a customer favorite.

iPad in a pocket. This pocket being our popular Pocquettes protective case. Santa’s elf has tucked an earbud holder inside.

Free to write on paper and work on iPad. Do them side by side in our Freeleaf folio, which works for right hand or left.

Circa and iPad: two icons of BOB-Tech, together at last. Circa, our award-winning note-taking system, is the physical embodiment of the virtual: eminently flexible and movable, amazingly changeable and rearrangeable. It has the brain of pixels and the soul of paper. Pair it with your iPad and productivity wins.

Where to park your minis. Whether it’s the iPad Mini, Kindle, Kobo or Nook, park it on our teeny-tiny Thai Pad. The design harks back centuries, and it’s made by hand by Thai village women. For their big brothers, get the full-size Thai Pad.

How to hug an iPad. Snuggle it in one of our soft bookrest pillows, the Bouclé iPad Pillow or the India Cloud Kantha Pillow.

The 16th-century GPS.  How do you map the world even though you can’t see it from above? Witness the extraordinary technology that resulted in the first map to name America as well as the first nautical map of the world. Both maps were created by hand, using woodblocks, but it’s thanks to high-resolution digitizing and hyperspectral images that we can experience it. Not available as an e-book, and when you hold this beautiful book, you’ll see why. It’s the heritage view of Seeing the World Anew.

Tell me, dear reader: are you a devotee of Best-of-Both Technology? How does BOB-Tech work for you? I’d love to hear. Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

Kate DiCamillo’s mouse that soared

When author Kate DiCamillo addressed the American Booksellers Association’s award luncheon a couple years ago, I was smitten. Few authors speak as powerfully in person as on the page, and Kate is one of them. She told of how, as a young girl, she discovered books in her town’s small local bookstore, and how it changed her life forever.

Years later, Kate DiCamillo would change the lives of countless young readers herself. She did it with the help of a very small mouse.

The Tale of Despereaux is the book that not only won the most prestigious award given to children’s books—the Newbery Medal—but also gave to children and adults a story that will likely endure alongside those from Hans Christian Andersen, A. A. Milne  and E. B. White. Despereaux, you see, is a little mouse with the big ears and bigger heart who is desperate to save a princess.

Despereaux went Hollywood several years ago, with a full-length feature film from Universal Studios. In 2012, Kate and Levenger conspired to bring him into 3D as a bookend. And this bookend itself tells a story.

Levenger Press editor Mim Harrison spoke with Kate about Despereaux’s morphing from an idea in her head to an object on her shelf. Here’s their conversation: 

Levenger Press: What has it been like to have a two-dimensional mouse made into a three-dimensional bookend?

Kate DiCamillo: It is an odd and humbling thing to sit alone in a dark room in the early hours of morning and try to imagine your way into the heart and soul of a (smaller-than-average) mouse, and then to watch him come to life in so many different ways. It truly seems like a dream to me.

LP: How is it different from seeing him being made into an animated film?

Kate: There is something wonderful about being able to reach out and actually touch the top of Despereaux's head. It was grand to see him up on the screen. And it is comforting to think about having him on my bookshelf.

LP: When you’re first creating the characters for your books in your head, do you see them in 3-D?

Kate: I do!  They are whole, complete, multi-dimensional, complicated and confounding in my mind.

LP: Despereaux is a children’s book—the recipient of the Newbery Medal for children’s literature, in fact—and yet you use grown-up words like coda in it. How do you write to appeal equally to children and adults?

Kate: I just work on trying to tell the story in the best way I am able. That is, I try to get out of my own way and let the story tell me what to do.

LP: For readers who haven’t read Despereaux (cripes, as Despereaux’s brother might say), what would you want to tell them about why there’s a spool of red thread on the bookend?

Kate: Something like this: that red thread is there to remind us all that there is a way through our troubles.

LP: Your message on the bottom of the bookend says, “Reader, I hope you found some light here.” What did you mean by that?

Kate: Stories are light to me. To read a story comforts me. To tell a story comforts me. The reading and the telling both illuminate. And that is a grand, grand thing.

And now to you, dear reader: what was the book where, as a youngster, you found light and comfort? I’d love to hear. Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

Have yourself a Google-less Christmas

Have you ever wanted to Google something and not done it just to see if you could remember? Recently I couldn’t remember the name of a famous actor. I’d even read his memoir, which I could visualize: on the white dust jacket was his black silhouette ambling away with a cane. The title of the book (ironically) was My Name Escapes Me, and he starred in that famous movie The Bridge on the River Kwai. I was frustrated with myself, feeling my brain going to mush, so I refused to pick up my phone or ask anyone. I believed I would remember with enough attempts and decided to let my brain struggle. Three or four times I thought on it.

Then, on the morning of the third day, after my first cup of coffee, it suddenly snapped in—Alec Guinness! Reflexively I seized the dome of my head with my right hand and beamed my biggest smile. It felt so good!

Will the neuroscientists in the room please explain this?

Don’t we all delight in the ease we now have to find facts? Yet does this also give us a renewed appreciation for how good it can feel when you make your mind do its own internal search?

Likewise, mobile, virtual gaming is exploding in popularity. An estimated xxxx million people (I would tell you how many, but I’d have to Google it) the world over now play mobile games, mainly by tapping the tips of their fingers on small glass screens. There’s no arguing how captivating these games can be, yet should they also give us a renewed appreciation for how good it can feel to play with our full hands as we manipulate real, three-dimensional objects?

We believe so.

That’s why here at Levenger we’ve been elfishly busy all year developing this season’s harvest of heritage gaming technology to delight your senses.

They are designed to connect mind and hand, and to activate connections between generations. Go ahead and Google, but not all the time. Play, also, with your full human, physical powers to connect with your loved ones, and yourself.

I love our Shut the Box,  Game Room in a Box, Domino-a-Go-Go  and Solitaire Times Two for the warm wood they put in your hand. The same is true of the Mancala game, which I also like because of its ancient origins that still connect us after all these years.

Even our puzzles—one of a Churchill painting, the other of a 14^th-century illuminated manuscript—are all wood, with the images created on archival paper.

I’d like to be like the Ghost of Christmas Present, invisibly watching generations old and young as they banter and tease and guess the answers in our Dickens Christmas Carol board game. (If you want a not-so-unfair advantage, read this edition of the book first. Some of the multiple-choice answers are found in the introduction…and would be hard to find even on Google.)

After hearing David McCullough say that he doesn’t write histories or biographies but rather, he tells a story, I want to better appreciate the storyteller’s craft. So I’m going to try out my storytelling skills using our Scheherazade Storytelling Game.

Tell me, dear reader, have you recently decided not to Google? Can you share a story of renewed appreciation for your full human capabilities? I’d love to hear. Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

Feliz Noël

Do you want to learn another language?

As some of you faithful readers know, for nearly five years now I’ve been studying Spanish. I’ve progressed from setting my iPhone and ATM to Spanish to actually conversing with my tutor.

And just recently, I’ve found myself having to grope for a word in English—a reach that sometimes, startlingly, eludes my grasp. Fortunately, my brain’s synapses are not misfiring (at least, not over this). Some scientists now report that for bilingual speakers, both languages keep up a lively buzz in the brain. Where once there was one, now there are dos.

It turns out that all that buzzing is good for you: it gives your cognitive muscles a workout. And though it seems counterintuitive, given that bilingual speakers are more acutely aware of what’s going on around them, bilingualism helps your brain stay focused and better resist distractions.

Muy bueno.

Multilingual learning, anyone?

I doubt that I will ever seriously venture beyond Spanish…and yet. Languages exert a force-field attraction. Language begets other languages—at the very least, an interest in them.

This holiday, then, if you shop around Levenger for brain boosters of a bilingual nature, you’ll find quite a number of languages ready to tease you and teach you and, we hope, please you.

Our popular Crossword Picante Spanish-English crosswords game, which sold out last year, is back, and this year we’ve added a French-English version, Crossword Santé. Since the games are set up so that you can spell a word in either language, proficiency is not a requisite. We also encourage players to use dictionaries. ¿Por que no?

We learned a lot while developing our Multilingual Learning Blocks. Each block spells the same word in six languages: Mandarin, French, German, Spanish, Latin and English.

We gave each language its own color and design. And how did we choose which six languages? We put on our research hats and selected those languages most commonly taught in American schools today. (Latin? A pleasant surprise.)

Next, how to choose the words? We turned to our friends at the Long Now Foundation, who spearhead The Rosetta Project, a critically important effort to preserve the world’s endangered languages.

Laura Welcher of The Rosetta Project turned us on to the Swadesh List, named after the linguist who compiled the most commonly used words across different languages. We then winnowed the list to 28 words whose meaning in English was limited to one definition.

I find it fascinating to turn these blocks in your fingers to see not just how different the words can be from one language to the next, but how similar some of them are. It made me rethink the idea that Latin is a dead language when I saw cor (heart) beating strongly in the Spanish corazón and the French coeur (and in the English coronary).

The price for these multi-language blocks is higher than the single-language blocks we offer (Chinese,  Hebrew,  Greek), but there’s good reason: they’re a custom-made set, made just for Levenger customers.

A written language with no alphabet

One of the many languages UNESCO has marked as endangered is Cherokee. We were intrigued by these Cherokee language blocks because the written Cherokee language has no equivalent of our A, B, Cs. Instead of an alphabet, Cherokee has a syllabary.

These are characters that represent syllables, and a Cherokee named Sequoyah created them in the early 1800s. Until then Cherokee, like most world languages, was not written but oral. Sequoyah recognized that having a written syllabary would give the Cherokee a chance to communicate through writing. They called their syllabary “talking leaves.”

How to learn 10 languages as easily as uno, due, très

For a fast and fun survey course of ten languages—Arabic, Danish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish—pocket a pouch of our ten-sided dice, each one with 1 to 10 in one of ten languages. It comes with a cheat sheet of simple phonetics (compiled with the help of native speakers), while listing the spelling of each number in the language. Seeing these spellings side by side helps to show the similarities among several of the languages.

The number six in English is the Danish seks, German sechs, Swedish sex, French six, Portuguese and Spanish seis, Italian sei. The same ribbon of familiarity runs through the word for nine: ni, neun, nio, neuf, nove, nueve, nove.

H’mmm. Maybe multilingualism isn’t as daunting as I thought.

How admiring I am of people who are fluent in three, four, and more languages—people like Steve Kaufmann, who helps so many others learn. How lucky they are—just imagine how toned their cognitive muscles are.

Are you one of them, dear reader? Or is there another language you’d like to learn? I’d love to hear. Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

Meantime, if you’d like to read a couple interesting pieces on benefits of bilingualism, try these:

http://www.npr.org/2011/04/04/135043787/being-bilingual-may-boost-your-brain-power

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-benefits-of-bilingualism.html

Made On Planet Earth

I’m proud to say that at Levenger, we source our products in America—and from all over the globe, including China. We pride ourselves at finding the best-quality manufacturers of our goods no matter where they may be, with the same blind justice as the Olympics: let the best competitor win. We feel a deep obligation to make the best Levenger products we can—in quality, sustainability, and price—and pass that value to our customers.

I also believe that, in general, the more nations trade, the less they fight. It’s bad business to kill customers.

Of course, exceptions have been made. Nations have gone to war against countries they trade with. Citizens have punished neighbors who provide valuable economic services. Yet by and large, nations and citizens behave in their economic interests. This is one reason why capitalism can be such a powerful force for good.

We source most of our leather goods in China because the Chinese make most of the world’s best leather goods. I’ve toured numerous Chinese leather factories and can assure you that many of the bags sold on Via Spiga, Bond Street, Madison Avenue and Rodeo Drive begin their careers in China. And this is a good thing.

The Chinese for decades have invested in the leather industry for both low-end and high-end goods. They have trained a vast labor pool of skilled workers required for the labor-intensive work that fine leather goods require. Owners and workers have benefited. In the twenty years I’ve been traveling to China, I’ve seen the parking lots jammed full of bicycles transform into lots full of motor scooters and cars. I’ve seen their factories add amenities (including libraries and computer learning centers) as they compete for skilled employees. I’ve seen the employees gain weight, which perhaps isn’t healthy for them, but nevertheless marks their improving wealth.

In the early years, we stayed at Spartan factory dorms. These days, factory owners drive us with pride to luxury Hyatt Hotels, where Audis and Land Rovers owned by Chinese executives are parked outside.

The Chinese have the infrastructure (tanneries, equipment suppliers, hardware) to support the quick sampling and rapid scaling of production that our fast-paced world demands.

I’m all for more highly skilled jobs in America that require education, creativity and hard work—all things that Americans are eminently capable of. American business executives have to play to our strengths, including innovation, entrepreneurism, and an understanding that doing the right thing can be profitable. A growing number of major firms are embracing this latter philosophy, which is one of the cornerstones of Conscious Capitalism.

But let’s not kid ourselves that protectionist trade policies will have any long-term beneficial effect for us or for our trading partners. Isolation breeds alienation. The world is too small to be alone in anymore. We’ll excel as a nation as we always have—the old-fashioned way, with our smarts and hard work.

I’m seeing promising things.

Our American leather partner in western Massachusetts has more automation than most Chinese factories—for example, automated folding machines that yield higher-quality products faster.

Our American printing partner in Maine links to us with a network of computers so that the moment you press the order button on Levenger.com, a digital printing press in Maine begins to make your custom creation. Then, through plain New England hustle, the sons and daughters of Maine fishermen pack and ship those orders the same day they are produced.

For a wonderful historical perspective on trade, I recommend The Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World by William J. Bernstein. I quote from his summary:

World trade has yielded not only a bounty of material goods, but also of intellectual and cultural capital, an understanding of our neighbors, and a desire to sell things to others rather than annihilate them.

 For an uplifting look at the general decline in world violence and the contributing role of capitalism, I highly recommend Steven Pinker’s meticulously researched and beautifully written The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

And now, come take an around-the-world trip to the origins of Levenger products. I’ve asked Levenger Press editor Mim Harrison to act as our tour guide:

Wicked good leather goods from Massachusetts. Pick up some of our embossed leatherware and know that while the leather comes from Italy, the crafting of it is done in the Bay State.

London, France, China and the world…by way of Wisconsin. Levenger Press may be the only publisher in America to have a book on China that was printed in America. We’re proud to say that nearly all Levenger Press books are printed by Worzalla, an employee-owned Master Printer in Wisconsin.

Our newest book with Worzalla, Seeing the World Anew, tells the story of a 16^th-century mapmaker from France who created two world maps that signaled a radically new world view.

For the book’s presentation at the Library of Congress National Book Festival in September, Rodger Beyer from Worzalla joined Levenger in cheering on the authors.

And Dickens may have penned his Christmas Carol in London, but the only true facsimile of his furiously scrawled pages was printed in America.

Mandarin from Michigan. We recently designed a set of Multilingual Learning Blocks that feature words in six different languages, including Mandarin. A family-owned company in Michigan hand-manufactured the blocks from replenishable local basswood. We worked with another U.S. organization, the Long Now Foundation, in selecting the languages and the words. 

Microbrew from Jersey. That would be our microbrewed Levenger Bottled Ink, and the secret recipe is known to only a few at a secret plant in New Jersey. 

Well-dotted i’s from Iowa. If you’ve written with a flourish with our Signature Stub Nib, you’ve gotten a feel for Iowa craftsmanship. That’s where the nibs are ground—by hand, by a master.

Mile-high Churchill. An original painting by Sir Winston Churchill goes for sky-high prices. Come to Levenger and you can get a laser-cut wooden puzzle featuring one of the few paintings to feature his initials. It’s crafted by a precision puzzler in Colorado.

Down-East on demand. Our Circa print-on-demand notebooks and our personalized 3 x 5 cards are made in Maine. The natives there have been paper makers almost as long as they’ve been bankers (as in fishermen who ply the Grand Banks).

Barristers heart New York. They are the real deal: the barrister bookcases with the glass fronts that you pull out and slide back in the best Atticus Finch tradition. Levenger Barrister Bookcases are manufactured in the best small-town-America tradition, in Herkimer, New York, by a company that’s been making them for more than a century.

Cabinets from the Keystone State. Our Lateral and Stackable File Cabinets  come from Pennsylvania and are made from solid cherry, oak or walnut.

Byron does the Big Easy. Our Shirt Pocket Poetry is pouched and packaged in New Orleans. And the cards? They’ve made in Memphis, the same city where you’ll find our customer service center. (Steve is partial to the fried pickles there.)

Amish country. From Indiana comes the Book Snug desk-size book holder that Amish craftsmen there make for us. As is their custom, they do not wish to have their faces photographed. But they did allow us to show you some photos of their hand work, which you can see on the link.

Americas the beautiful. From Argentina comes some of the leather we use; from Chile, some of the pulp for the paper our Taiwanese manufacturer makes. From Haiti come iPad sleeves hand-quilted by women under the wing of an American humanitarian group, whom we hooked up with by way of Martha’s Vineyard. Indeed, it is a small world after all.

Oh, to be from England. That’s where all our Tusting leather bags are from. They’re made in the True Brit tradition of a small, family-run manufactory that’s been turning out quality for generations. England is also where our Bodleian Bilingual Bags for books comes from, and you can’t get much more British than that. 

Do the Continental. The paper in the Rhodia notebooks we offer comes from France. (The notebooks are actually printed and bound in Buffalo, New York.) From the land of IKEA come Whitelines, the notebooks from Sweden. We look to Germany for our pen nibs and Italy for both pens and some leather. And like Marco Polo, we look farther East for additional craftsmanship.

Silk Road, Levenger-style. Our Thai Pad is handmade in Thailand from silk. From artisans in India come the India Cloud Kantha Book Pillow. From Korea comes leather; Malaysia, paper; Japan, the resin for our Kyoto pen. And In Taiwan and mainland China we work with artisans, entrepreneurs and factories to produce a number of our paper and leather products, as well as deskware. 

If Levenger had a manufacturing map app, you’d find us—well, all over the map. But only where there are people with a like-minded passion for quality. That makes it a small world after all.

 

And now to you, dear reader: have you bought something recently based on where it was made? I’d love to hear. Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

Jennifer Lee goes to the (yoga) mat for right-brain business plans

Meet Jennifer in the delightful live chat we had October 23: http://www.rightbrainbusinessplan.com/2012/10/23/livestream-interview-with-levenger-ceo-steve-leveen/

Don’t tell my finance group, but I no longer feel quite so deficient for not taking accounting courses when Lori and I became entrepreneurs. I have Jennifer Lee to thank.

A graduate of UCLA and USC, Jennifer runs a successful professional-coaching company in the San Francisco Bay area. She’s developed a right-brain method of business planning that’s clicked with many entrepreneurs. First she captured all her ideas in a book, The Right-Brain Business Plan: A Creative, Visual Map for Success.  Now she’s distilled the essence of her approach in our Circa notebooks.   

One of Jennifer’s clients saw a 37 percent increase in growth in year one of thinking Right Brain Business Plan, and a 50 percent spike in year two. Another client went from being employee to entrepreneur with no drop in pay the first year. That client routinely revisits her Right Brain Business Plan to keep refueling her plans.

It sounds counterintuitive, right brain and business plan. The right brain is supposed to be expansive and creative, not the place where you’ll find analytical thinking lurking. But Jennifer gets you thinking in pictures, with a result that’s both painless and productive.

I confess: Levenger has followed a linear, left-brain, bullet point and spreadsheet method of planning. But now that Jennifer is among our Circa Thought Leaders, we may have to rethink that.

It’s my pleasure to introduce Jennifer to you by way of this conversation with Levenger Press editor Mim Harrison, as the two discuss right brains, paper…and the value of taking a deep breath.

Levenger: How does a visual business plan help in developing a viable one?

Jennifer: A visual plan helps to communicate an idea beyond words. The images, colors and symbols quickly and intuitively get to the essence of the vision and goals. And because visuals appeal more to our emotions, the plan can be more impactful and inspiring.

Levenger: Not all right-brainers are artists. Will your approach still work for them?

Jennifer:  If you can tear images from magazines and use a glue stick, or write with colorful markers on sticky notes, you can benefit from this way of planning. I believe that everyone is creative, and it’s about using whatever medium or form of expression that speaks to you. The most important thing is that your plan is meaningful to you and that it inspires action.

Levenger: You recommend using a bulletin board to help in identifying markets and trends—and you mean a physical bulletin board. There’s a strong element of physicality to your method: index cards, magazine pages, sticky notes. Why does physical paper still matter?

Jennifer: Physical paper helps makes our ideas tangible. It gets us out of our heads and lets us work with our hands to bring our thoughts to life. We can easily move index cards or sticky notes around to find patterns, group similar concepts, and prioritize.  They allow us to interact with our musing in the material world.

Levenger: Instead of a financial spreadsheet, you advocate a Moola Map. Instead of a networking list, you talk about Creative Cohorts. Rather than an executive summary, you recommend Hearty Highlights. How does such playful language help in designing a plan?

Jennifer: For some of us creative types, our brains tune out when we hear something too traditional or boring. Some classic business terms even sound war-like (competitive advantage, tactics, deadlines, execution) and can conjure up negative associations. If we want to make planning more engaging and, dare we say, fun, then it helps to use phrases that are more relatable and disarming—with a bit of whimsy thrown in to spark the creative spirit.

Levenger: Your not-so-secret secret is that you were once part of corporate America. Does it help to have this left-brain training before embarking on a business plan based on right-brain thinking?

Jennifer: It’s true, I did spend some time (about a decade) in corporate America and I do believe that experience has influenced how I plan. Even though I have this background—and it has certainly come in handy at times—I don’t think it’s a requirement for doing a business plan based on right-brain thinking. And for some people, it could hinder their creative process to be too concerned with following a step-by-step process. The key is to stay connected with what’s most important to you and your business.

Levenger: You’re a yogini. What exactly does that mean?

Jennifer: A yogini is a woman who practices yoga. I’m certified in Ashtanga yoga, and I love the way the practice grounds me and connects my mind, body, and spirit.  I haven’t been doing the physical asanas (poses/exercises) as much as I’d like now due to an injury, but that just encourages me to practice the principles of yoga “off the mat” instead. For instance, bringing as much awareness into the present moment as I can (a tough one for a busy entrepreneur, but much needed, too!), finding balance, slowing down, letting go of judgments and expectations—and remembering to breathe.

Levenger:  Do you see a connection between the contemplative nature of yoga and the contemplative power of paper?

Jennifer: Actually, yes, I can see a parallel between the two. In our fast-paced digital world, the next bright, shiny object can easily distract us. But both the practice of yoga and the act of writing by hand on paper can be grounding forces in our daily lives and can help us connect more consciously to our creative flow.

With yoga, when you align your physical movement with your breath, you help to calm your mind and take in the present moment more deeply.

When you write on paper, you can focus more intently on what’s right in front of you rather than be tempted to multi-task on-screen. You become more aware of your senses: the feel of the pen gliding across the page, the smell of ink, or the satisfaction of flipping the page to continue a thought.

In a way, practicing yoga and writing on paper can both be forms of a moving meditation.

Now to you, dear reader: have you ever considered yourself a right-brain thinker trapped in a left-brain world? I’d love to hear. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you’ll connect to Comments).

The whole earth, ca. 1507

If you’re a boomer like me, you may remember that high-octane java jolt when you first encountered the cover of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog from 1968. There was Earth, seen from the unearthly prospect of space, a vantage point never seen before. It was a whole new way of looking at the world. 

When I look at the two Renaissance maps we’ve just published, I wonder if those who encountered them back in the sixteenth century had a comparable shock. Because clearly, the world would never be seen in quite the same way.

The maps are two of the treasures in the Library of Congress, which was our partner in this publishing project.

The creator of the maps, a German humanist living in France named Martin Waldseemüller, is someone most of us haven’t heard of. And yet his 1507 map was the first to put the name AMERICA on a map. Even more radically, the map showed an ocean to the west of North and South America, where one had never been placed before.

His 1516 map is called the Carta marina, or “Sea chart.” It draws liberally on iconography to demonstrate that no longer would world views be guided by the guesswork of the second-century Greek cartographer Ptolemy, as all maps up to this point had been. Instead, Waldseemüller took his cues from someone who’d actually been there: Christopher Columbus.

The title of our book is Seeing the World Anew. What strikes me when I read the captivating text by John Hessler and Chet Van Duzer is how similar a time to Waldseemüller’s we now live in. It’s a much different world from 1507, of course, but comparable upheavals of the status quo and radical shifts in knowledge are taking place. Things that seemed immutable in a pre-digital world are no longer. In an era of GPS and Google maps, the creased paper map in the glove compartment from 2002 seems almost as ancient as Ptolemy.

The editor of Levenger Press, Mim Harrison, worked along with John and Chet on the making of Seeing the World Anew. Both men are cartographic scholars, and each is the authority on the map he wrote about—John on the 1507, Chet on the 1516. I asked Mim to share some of their ongoing dialogue about how Waldseemüller was able to see the world as he did.

John (L) and Chet presenting their book at the National Book Festival in Washington, DC.

Levenger Press: John, you’d mentioned early in our conversations that what the 1507 World Map said about the world was the modern-day equivalent of being told there was human life on Mars. Was it because Waldseemüller showed North and South America as having an ocean on their western coasts?

John Hessler: I was really looking for a dramatic way to describe what was, essentially, a geographic revolution. The discovery of the New World, just a few years before Waldseemüller’s great map, was an event that changed the way the Old World perceived itself. It was a revolution not only of information but also of identity. No longer were the people of Europe, who of course this had the most effect on, alone. No longer did they have a special place. Waldseemüller uses both new and old information, and I think he is trying to draw a deep contrast between the geography of the ancient world as embodied by Ptolemy and that of the new discoveries. He is really trying to graphically portrait radical change.

LP: And yet nine years later, Waldseemüller essentially backpedaled on the Carta marina and did away with that western ocean. Why would he have abandoned this knowledge?

Chet Van Duzer: Two factors need to be taken into account in considering the absence of a western ocean on the Carta marina. First, in that map, Waldseemüller adopts Columbus’s view of the newly discovered lands, which is that it was part of Asia. We can see this clearly in a legend in North America, which labels that area “Land of Cuba, part of Asia.” If the newly discovered lands are part of Asia, there is no ocean between those lands and Asia. Second, in the Carta marina Waldseemüller has created a more practical map that shows the areas of the world where Europeans sailed, and where trade was conducted. Hence the long list of trade goods available in India in the lower right corner of the map. Waldseemüller’s focus on creating a more practical image of the world in the Carta marina also likely played a role in his omitting speculation about a western ocean on the map.

LP: Waldseemüller radically changed the history of how we saw the world. Why is it, then, that most of us never read of Waldseemüller in our history books?

John: One of the most exciting things about Waldseemüller’s maps is that they were very understudied as few as fifteen years ago. Almost all of the modern scholarship that has been produced on the maps has come in that time period, and we are still making new discoveries about the maps even now. There are many things that for one reason or another become canonic stories in our history, some of which are very difficult to overcome. History as a series of real acts is very complicated; the writing of it must simplify and select.

Chet: Large wall maps do not survive well over the centuries. In the case of the 1507 and 1516 maps, if copies of the maps were glued to walls like wallpaper, which is probably what Waldseemüller intended, they were destroyed during renovations. Even if they are not glued to anything, the large sheets are difficult to store, which means that they are more readily discarded. The fact that no copies of the maps were known for many years prior to the discovery in 1901 of the copies now in the Library of Congress means that these two maps were unavailable for study during the nineteenth century. I hope that Seeing the World Anew, together with the increasing scholarly and public interest in maps, will do something to make “Waldseemüller” more of a household name.

LP: One thing that’s striking on the Carta marina is the iconography that you describe so vividly in the book, and some of it is the stuff of science fiction. Doesn’t it seem ironic that this rational, scientific thinker would also believe that in certain parts of the world, there were human creatures who just inhaled the aroma of apples for sustenance and never actually ate?

Chet: Waldseemüller was dependent on the sources available to him. He made less use of Marco Polo on his 1516 map than he had on his 1507 map, perhaps because in part because he had decided that Polo was not entirely reliable. Also, he had access to accounts by more recent travelers and geographers. The information about the “monstrous races” of India that he used on the Carta marina came from Pierre d’Ailly’s Ymago mundi, which was written in about 1410, and published in the 1480s. So this information would have seemed relatively recent. It is also possible that Waldseemüller thought that the curious images of the “monstrous races” of men would help sell copies of the Carta marina.

LP: John, in your spare time, you’re an alpinist, and you’ve said that “there has always been something about a mountain that makes it appear mappable.” Waldseemüller essentially lived tucked away in the mountains in northern France. Do you think these inspired him?

John:  Our fascination with mountains and their beauty is a very modern invention. It’s most likely that in Waldseemüller’s time, these places were to be avoided. Waldseemüller did produce a map of his home region, which shows the mountains of the Vosges quite clearly. But if you look at that map closely, or at any of his other maps for that matter, there is really nothing shown happening in the mountains. It’s as if for people of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, there was really no geography going on in these places to speak of.

LP: For those of us who are new to appreciating old maps, how should we look at them in order to best enjoy them?

Chet: In making world maps during the Middle Ages or Renaissance, cartographers had much less information at their disposal than modern cartographers do. Thus, these maps contain more in the way of speculation, guesses and extrapolation, and from the cartographers themselves, more about their assumptions, cultural influences and learning. I personally enjoy looking at the  use of sources for clues about the cartographer’s character. But it is also important to mention the aesthetic qualities of maps: it is exhilarating to see the whole world at a glance, and also to be able to explore the details so easily, merely by shifting one’s eyes, without the burdens of travel. And the Waldseemüller maps are works of high art, both in their design and in the expression of that design by the cutters of the woodblocks from which the sheets were printed, that abundantly repay study.

John:  I think one must try, as best as one can (even though for historians this is pure fantasy), to put oneself in the place being mapped. Attempt to look at the conjunction between the actual landscape being mapped and the mapmaker himself, and for just a moment, try to grasp how difficult it must have been to make a map, to construct it accurately, before it was possible to get above the surface of the earth and look at it from above. Even though I have been involved with cartography, either as a mapmaker or historian for most of my adult life, I still marvel at the skill and geometric insights these early mapmakers drew from such limited information. I still wonder about what has been called the hidden fourth dimension of cartography, where the mapmaker’s mind interacts with a place, and forms a graphic and symbolic image that others can understand.

And now to you, dear reader: What has happened in your lifetime to make you see the world differently? I'd love to hear about your java-jolt moment. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you're reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments.)