Well-Read Life™

Does Hand-Writing Matter?

Now that that old bloodhound Writing-by-Hand is banished to the doghouse out back, while the twin white poodles named Tapping and Typing are on our laps at the dinner table, should we care? Is there any evidence that taking pen in hand is somehow better for thinking or remembering? At Levenger we have a dog in this fight, since we sell lots of nice writing instruments and quality paper. So I’ll admit we have a bias to seek out such evidence and share it widely.

With that confession, let me also say that we’re attempting to take a balanced look at the evidence. My biggest fear is that we jettison writing by hand on paper prematurely, without considering its benefits. And one thing is sure—we’re all falling more deeply in love with our smartphones and tablets, me included.

So I’ve asked Mim Harrison, editor of Levenger Press, to do a deep dive into the literature and write up her findings. Here is her report:

—Steve

Richard Mason’s novel The Gilded Curve: History of a Pleasure Seeker is not just a digital book; it’s a multimedia, interactive experience known as an eLumination. Tap onto an illustration of a street or building and it comes to life in video. Tap the gramophone icon (gramophone!) and it’s an audiobook, with one of the cast of Downton Abbey reading to you. Historical context of the story, set in Amsterdam in 1907, is just another tap away.

What you’re really tapping into is your imagination, in ways that an electronic platform can uniquely offer.

There’s one other button to tap, and that’s the one where this 36-year-old author tells you why he wrote his novel—by hand.

“I wanted to introduce something physical to the process,” he says in the video clip. Hand-writing, he says, “encourages concision and briskness and quickness.”

Or, as the novelist Mark Helprin  says, “a pen (somehow) helps you think and feel.”

A number of neuroscientists would agree.

It is all in your head

Humans have been writing—putting their hands to something­—since the Sumerians started chiseling away at cuneiforms around 3500 B.C.

“Handedness is uniquely human,” writes the neurologist Frank R. Wilson in his book titled, appropriately, The Hand. We humans are the only one of the evolutionary bunch to favor one hand over the other.

It’s one of those instances where saying “it’s all in your head” has more than a modicum of truth. “Any theory of human intelligence which ignores the interdependence of hand and brain function…is grossly misleading,” Dr. Wilson asserts.

Brain changer

Our brains are wired in ways not only intricate but specific. We use one set of circuits to add, for example, and a different set to subtract.

Much of this wiring begins early. At the Library of Congress’s international summit on books and literacy, Karen Keninger, the director of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, stressed the importance for the blind of learning Braille when they’re young.

“It’s difficult to learn Braille as an adult because of the wiring you have to do between your hands and your brain,” said Karen (who is blind).

Occupational therapist Marion Wilm maintains on her Child and Family Development blog that children who don’t know how to hand-write are compromising the development of their fine-motor skills. These skills provide the kind of dexterity that surgeons and scientists need.

As it is with surgeons and scientists (and plumbers and mechanics), so it is with humans who write: tools matter. Picking up a pen can put in motion a different set of circuits from tapping on a keyboard.

Anne Mangen and Jean-Luc Velay, two European researchers, describe some of these different “neural pathways” in their 2010 study, “Digitizing Literacy: Reflections on the Haptics of Writing.” (Think tactile for haptics; from the Greek for to grasp.)

They cite experiments that showed how Japanese readers would use different sets of circuitry in their brains when they read two different kinds of Japanese writing, kana (used for foreign words, proper names, and grammatical elements) and kanji (which is based on older, Chinese characters).

These different neural pathways were also evident in another study the researchers cite, where some subjects hand-wrote characters and others typed them. Magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI (the f is for functional; it measures changes in blood flow in the brain) revealed that different parts of the brain kicked in, depending on whether someone was hand-writing or typing.

How, then, does this different circuitry affect how we think and remember and execute?

Write, memory

A 2010 study at Indiana University showed, again through an fMRI, that children remembered letters better when they wrote them out than when they merely studied them. Adults have been shown to respond in a similar way, particularly when learning a new set of symbols or characters.

But does hand-writing have the upper hand over typing where memory is concerned?

There is some evidence to indicate that it does.

On a keyboard or typewriter, every letter or symbol is exactly the same touch (those haptics again). With a pen or a pencil, as University of Washington educational psychologist Virginia Berninger has noted, your hand is acknowledging each stroke involved in making that symbol or character. Your brain seems to pay more attention when your hand is so invested. Her studies, often conducted with other researchers, have found that schoolchildren who hand-write have better recall.

“The physical act of writing or tracing provides an additional layer of memory,” write three other researchers from the University of Central Florida, Timothy J. Smoker, Carrie E. Murphy and Alison K. Rockwell. Hand-writing involves distinct, specific movements. Typing is the same, repetitive movement. Handwriting, say these researchers, “creates more context, thereby increasing retention.”

This results in more than simply remembering the letters you wrote. It can make you a better note-taker.

Take note

Philip Hensher, the author of The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting, is also a frequent classroom lecturer. He can tell you which students do the worst and the best in his classes:

“The students who make no record…do worst….The second worst are the ones who plonk a tape recorder on the desk….The worst ones after that are the ones who get out their laptops, and type furiously as you speak….because typing as someone talks encourages transcription without much thought.”

And the best?

“The very best students are the ones who take out a piece of paper and a pen, and write down the things that they think are interesting as you talk, making sense of it as they go.”

A 2011 study conducted by Tina Weston and Randy L. Newman at the University of Manitoba corroborates clinically what Hensher found empirically. Taking notes by typing on a laptop worked better than hand-writing notes if the students were tested immediately, but this advantage disappeared if testing was delayed.

“Handwriting,” write the Manitoba researchers, “is more likely to withstand the test of time.”

Brain craves

In a virtual world, then, there is still virtue—and value—in the physical. And, says technology forecaster Paul Saffo, “it isn’t just the ink. It’s the interaction of ink and paper and stylus.”

He is using stylus in its ancient reference to a writing utensil. But what about the new definition of stylus—the kind you use to tap an iPad and a smartphone? How will writing and learning and memory change, the more we use a 21^st-century stylus to write on a 21^st-century tablet?

In The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, author Charles Duhigg tells us that for an activity to become a habit, there must be not just a cue and reinforcement but also a craving.

Many of us came quickly to crave email, then smartphones, then e-readers and tablets. We’re teaching ourselves new habits as far as how we read as well as write. Our brains have apparently readily engaged with the digital.

So does it really matter if we no longer write by hand, even if it can be beneficial? Most of us can’t easily read Middle English, either, but we can readily find a modern-English version of The Canterbury Tales.

True. But here’s the thing: we have a unique opportunity in this decade to use both these skills, hand-writing and digital printing—whether the latter be keyboarding or texting or writing through voice-recognition software. Why not leverage all our assets? Use all of our tools—and more of our brains?

We do eventually lose the skills we don’t use. But why relinquish something that’s so easy to hold onto?

Especially since we now know that the kinesthetics of writing by hand affects how we think by brain.

“I think, therefore I am,” wrote Descartes long ago. Perhaps today he would say:

“I write, therefore I think.”

What think you?

—Mim

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this. 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).

Seven Practices for Finding the Time to Read

It’s easy to find more time to read: all you have to do is pick up a book you can’t put down.

Then repeat.

Sounds like I’m kidding, but I’m serious. So how do you find those books you can’t put down? Start by picking up books you think you might like, and just start reading. If you don’t love it, set it aside and try another.

Pick up enough of these candidate books, and you’ll never again have trouble finding the time to read. Unless, of course, you have to work. But at least you’ll be dying to get back to your book—and that’s the formula for a well-read life.

Moreover, it’s never been easier to find those books you think you’ll like. Here are seven practices, including both tried-and-true traditional ways as well as practices newly enabled by technology.

Practice One: Jump on your friend’s book. Friends often—although not always—love the same kind of books. When you find a friend reading something, read a few pages yourself. Reading books together is one time-tested way to get more from your reading, and from your friendships.

Practice Two: Listen to what wise readers recommend. Down through the centuries, wise young people have asked wise old people what books they have liked. This works as well now as ever, but today it’s easier because we have access to a long pantheon of greats. Here, for example, is David McCullough’s Jefferson Lecture, in which he tells us what books as a young reader led him to his calling as a historian. They are as great today, he assures us, as they ever were.

Better yet, listen to David read his 38-minute talk, and feel as though you’re at the dinner table with him.

Practice Three: Watch the movie first. At Levenger, we call these movies-to-books boovies.  Many people think they’re cheating if they don’t read the book first, but this is mistaking precedent for reason. The truth is, a movie can be a pleasing portal to the longer treatment of a book—even if the movie is bad.

Consider these facts: Most movies last about two hours and are based on a script of about 100 pages, whereas most novels are 250 to 350 pages and take from 8 to 20 hours to read. Plus, while movies excel at action and special effects of the visual kind, books allow readers to experience that unique special effect of mind reading—when the author conveys what a character is thinking.

Reading the book first can naturally have you expecting to see all the characters and scenes of the book, so it’s easy to be disappointed. A screenwriter and director must toss out whole chapters, and even characters, to create movies people want to watch.

So what if you do watch the movie first but leave the theater disappointed?

Mitchell Kaplan, the owner of Books & Books and partner in the film company Mazur-Kaplan, explains why movies often fail despite being based on a great book:

“A good movie depends both on an excellent treatment—the screenplay—and excellent execution of the movie itself. That’s very hard to do, and bear in mind that producers don’t get paid unless a movie is made, so sometimes compromises are made.”

As for the original book?

“As a matter of course, you can’t go wrong choosing a book that has been made into a film,” Mitchell says. “There is something attractive in it—story, mood, texture, a character, or the world it created.”

If you actually like the movie, it’s almost a sure bet you’ll love the book, and be richer for the double experience.

Last year saw big-budget remakes of Les Misérables and Anna Karenina plus debuts of The Hobbit and Life of Pi. This year, we’re in store for more luminous popcorn burners:

• “Ender’s Game,” based on the popular science fiction novel by Orson Scott Card, starring Harrison Ford and Ben Kingsley.

• “The Great Gatsby,” another filthy-rich attempt to screen The Great American Novel, this time starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan, with Toby Maguire as one of the most famous narrators in literature. You can watch the trailer now. Think it will out-luster the movie made 39 years ago with Robert Redford, Mia Farrow and Sam Waterston?

“Paranoia,” based on the deliciously dark corporate espionage novel by Joseph Finder, starring Liam Hemsworth, Gary Oldman and the very busy Harrison Ford.

What a red-carpeted year in books it promises to be.

Practice Four: Try audiobooks—again. Some people tell me they don’t like audiobooks. When I ask how many and how recently they’ve tried, I often hear they tried only one or two, and years ago. News Flash: Today’s audiobooks rock!

From their sketchy cassette-tape commercial beginnings in the 1970s, audiobooks have blossomed into beautiful art forms that garner their own awards and fan clubs for narrators. Narrators (usually stage actors) are reviewed ceaselessly by listeners, and only the great ones read today.

Audiobooks are, in my experience, best for novels, histories and narrative nonfiction. They are one of the blessings of our age—an unsurpassed way to get more books in your life. Don’t tell me you don’t like audiobooks unless you’ve tried at least three, and recently. One more thing, now that I’m lecturing: they’re not just for driving.

Check out AudioFile Magazine for award winners and reviews. Let an audiobook change your life.

Practice Five: Browse shamelessly. No bookstore, physical or virtual, will kick you out for browsing. The more books you taste, the more books you’ll eat up with gusto. Technology has paved our book streets in gold; we just have to know it.

Practice Six: See your way into books. I loved Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. But don’t take my word for it. See her TED video, which 3.5 million introverts have already quietly done.

See or hear the brilliant Steven Pinker explain his masterpiece, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, as he presents his Long Now Foundation SALT talk in San Francisco. After his presentation he’s interviewed by Stewart Brand. Wow!

Before spending hours reading Sherry Turkle’s rewarding book Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, see her seven-minute interview with Stephen Colbert.

Thinking about reading Warren Buffett’s newest? Start with six minutes of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

Can you see yourself laughing your way into new books? I can.

Practice Seven: Listen to a podcast. Today it’s easy to download podcasts and feel as though you’re on an intimate phone call with very interesting people. Here are three of my favorites:

1. Steve Mirsky, a beloved editor at Scientific American, is like a great jazz musician: he’s a master at asking just enough of the scientists and authors he interviews, and then stepping out of the way. Listen to him interview David Quammen about his latest nonfiction thriller: Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic.
2. Jeff Kline interviews business leaders on the future of Conscious Capitalism (a bright future, indeed). Listen to his interview of author Cindy Wigglesworth on her new book about learning spiritual intelligence.
3. Ann Kingman and Michael Kindness—mild-mannered book salespeople by day, celestial book mavens at night. After listening to their Books on the Nightstand, you’ll want a bigger nightstand.

Okay, I’m stopping at seven. And I haven’t even mentioned book reviews, blogs, and our treasured librarians.

It may seem counter-intuitive, given that we’re trying to find more time to read, to first spend time surveying and sampling books. But remember that chefs who wish to prepare a sumptuous feast rise early and go to the farmer’s market.

So let us get our coffee or tea, my friend, and start walking the book aisles, with morning’s golden light at our backs.

And now to you, dear reader: What would you suggest for Practice Number Eight?  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).

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).

Giving Thanks

“Still must I very thankful be

For things that are a part of me.”

—E.B. White, 1926

 

Still, in this twenty-fifth year of Levenger,

I am so very thankful for what is

so much a part of me—

you, our customer.

 

Happy Thanksgiving.

Steve

 

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).

Turning the Page on How We Read

While sitting in a waiting room recently, I observed an elderly couple, both reading on e-readers. The man tilted his head toward the woman and asked, “What percent are you?”

“Fifty-two,” she said.

“Eighty-five,” he responded.

For this baby boomer, born in the middle of the last century, it’s disconcerting to lose such basic navigational aids as page numbers. The electronic reading storm has cut their cables, setting proud old page numbers adrift, sinking to the bottom or wallowing in the currents, destined to be cast up on some distant shore called long ago.

Will page numbers even be denied their traditional role in footnotes?

As I write this, I am gazing at a handsome hardcover of The Iliad resting rather weightily on my desk, admiring its glossy black dust jacket with its elegant gold type, the black ribbon bookmark extending languidly from its creamy pages. I have not read the print version but have listened to the audio recording. So come to think of it, percentage might be more relevant than page numbers here as well.

My copy of the Iliad

I felt particularly justified in listening to this great work, since it was originally oral and was committed to writing only when it was already an old story. Today, owning the printed version is an affordable luxury I indulge in—and there is no better way to dip into its river of thought than to leaf through its beautiful pages.

But getting back to that couple in the waiting room—it’s actually a marvelous thing that two people can so easily read a book together. Of course, we could do this when books were limited to print, but it wasn’t common. Both readers could have their own copy. Or they could share one. A few years back during a plane trip, I watched as a couple read together. The man ripped his paperback in half and gave the first half to his wife. (Even I, who likes to get physical with books, was a bit disturbed by that move.)

For years I’ve asked people what they’re reading; these days, I’m also asking how they’re reading. I’ve been hearing some intriguing things.

Virtual book tastings

One woman, who has always been an avid reader, told me she reads even more books now just because it’s so easy to get new books on her e-reader.

And e-readers do appear to be causing a growth spurt in reading. The Association of American Publishers reports that in 2010, when e-readers were gaining traction, the market for trade books in all reading formats grew nearly six percent from 2008, to $13.94 billion.

Most of us have had the experience of just finishing a book and not wanting to say goodbye. Now, with a few clicks, we can be reading another book by that author in minutes. What’s not to love?

I asked another reader whether he consults The New York Times bestsellers list in choosing his books. He looked at me as if I were a simpleton.

“Oh, the Times is way behind,” he explained. “I see what’s popular online and read a sample for free. And besides, there are all these really cheap books available that are great reads.”

Sampling books with ease may be my favorite aspect of electronic books. When I wrote The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life: How to get more books in your life and more life from your books back in 2004, I encouraged people to sample many books and be willing to put them aside. I explained the 50-page rule—that is, give it 50 pages and then give it the heave-ho if it doesn’t hold your interest.

Too many readers are still stymied by the clean-your-plate mentality—a feeling of guilt if they give up on a book. But I say, if you’re not giving up on at least 10 books a year, you’re not sampling enough—not truly opening up yourself to your rich inheritance as a reader that awaits you. Electronic books make sampling marvelously easy (although now we’ll have to substitute a 15 percent rule for the 50-page).

In an ingenious reversal of showrooming (that practice of walking into stores to touch the merchandise, only to go home and order online), I heard from one man who says he samples books at Amazon, decides what he wants, and then walks into his bricks-and-mortar bookstore to buy the print versions.

The books (still) on the bookshelf

Another blessing of electronic books is that they have solved the space problem. And I’m not referring to the advantage of taking an e-reader on vacation instead of a satchel full of books; I’m talking about your home library.

In the print era, many book lovers only with regret culled books from their library. “I can’t add a book unless I’m willing to give one up,” lamented Stanley Marcus when we visited his elegant home in Dallas years ago. And he had a huge library, amassed over his long, well-read life.

But now that we can keep track of what we’ve read in a virtual library, such as Good Reads,  Library Thing or Shelfari, we can also keep our notes on those books in the bookish cloud, and see them on our virtual shelves; it doesn’t hurt so much to say goodbye to some of the ones less important to us.

Besides, if you ever wanted a printed copy again, you could easily find it—a blessing we now take for granted in our post-Internet world.

One of the very best practices for a well-read life is to avidly build a library of books you might like to read—your Library of Candidates, as I call it. It allows you to make better choices of the right book for you to read right now, and helps ensure that you can always be in book love.

With electronic access, you don’t have to actually buy these books ahead of time and have them on your shelf, beckoning to you (although it’s a sweet luxury if you have the space for it). Instead, you can depict them in your electronic library—your wish library—and then get them virtually in your hands in minutes. How heavenly.

So today you can, with an easy mind, fill your home library of printed books with only your very favorites. Today we can each build a privately curated museum of printed treasures.

Making your mark (because it matters)

Leaving footprints in the Iliad

I realize many people are still reluctant to write in their books—Preservationists, I call them, as opposed to Footprint Leavers, like myself.  I say: bless you, Preservationists, for your thoughtfulness in imagining that someone else may want to read your book in its original condition someday. But I urge you to turn the page on that particular noble sentiment; with eBooks, people can always read unmarked books.

Instead of showing what Anne Fadiman calls courtly love, indulge in her carnal love. Get physical with your physical books—mark them boldly with your name and quirky marginalia; add the dates of when you read your books and where. Upon review, these marks will bring your reading experience rushing back to life and help you retain what you wish to hold in your mind and heart.

My personel Iliad time capsule

Interleave ephemera such as ticket stubs to the movie adaptation. Tuck printouts of emails you exchanged on the book, or your own typed review, inside the dust jacket (which makes such a nice little folder). Your hardcover books become personal time capsules—compact, beautiful, and lasting.

Know that it’s your personal marks in your books that not only make your book a unique artifact for your own enjoyment, but for the enjoyment of your family members who may outlive you, and for your grateful descendants.

The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt

In his award-winning history The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Stephen Greenblatt tells the story of how a canny librarian purchased a marked-up, 1563 Latin edition of On the Nature of Things for a few hundred pounds. When the librarian’s hunch proved correct, the value of the book, both monetarily and historically, was immense. That marked-up book was none other than Montaigne’s personal copy.

Of course, most of us will not be historical figures, but we are beloved by our own families, and especially by our survivors. Let’s give them something to talk about—hidden inside the cherished antiques your hardcovers will become.

Support what you love

Printed books are declining faster than any projections, according to a major book printer. Bowker Market Research reports that the market share for hardcovers dropped from 46 percent in 2009 to 39 percent in just two years.  By the first quarter of 2012, eBooks had racked up more than $30 million more in sales than printed books, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal: $282 million for e, $250 million for p.

So vote with your dollars and buy hardcover editions of the books you care about most—for the same reason we should send handwritten notes via first-class mail: to support the commercial arts we love. In the words of author Lynn Twist, “what we appreciate, appreciates.”

Besides, what do you actually own with an eBook? Not the book. That hardcover, on the other hand, is yours to hold and love and hand down.

At a dinner party last week, my table mate was telling me about a toddler she saw who ambled up to a coffee table book and swiped her finger gently on the page in an attempt to make it turn.

Will we have to teach new generations what pages were, the way we wonder how buttonhooks worked? When we say to a group of young people, “Let’s all get on the same page here,” will they gaze back with a quizzical look?

Call me romantic, but I hope the page metaphor will linger. After all, we still speak of turning down the lights (harkening back to gaslight, I suppose) and dialing phone numbers.

But it’s not just the metaphor of the page that I hope will live on. Like The Iliad, some pages—physical, bound, well-turned and even annotated—still belong on our bookshelves.

How about you, dear reader? How are you reading now? What observations can you share with me? 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).

Just what exactly is a well-read life

Here at Levenger our year started off with a gift that came in the form of an email from the International Reading Association. We had invited them to be the recipient of our donation made in conjunction with the sale of our Thai Pad. This book-and-iPad pillow is made by hand by women in a remote village of northeast Thailand. (My son Cal traveled there last year and sent back his dispatch on Thai Pad Country.)

We knew it would be difficult, if not impossible, to have our donation reach the specific village, but we were happy to know that it would benefit aspiring readers in some part of the country.

And then we received this email from Amy Kushner, a program officer at the International Reading Association:

Happy New Year! I hope this email finds you well. I wanted to update you on the Thai project. I just received a response from Uthai Piromruen, a literacy expert in Thailand who has been one of the most active members of the reading association over the past many years. At one time, he was the President of the Thailand Reading Association, and has also served as the Chair of our Asia-wide region. I wanted to forward you his response (below), so that you can pass along his joy and appreciation of the gift that Levenger directed toward Thailand. His email also explains the delay in getting back to me (flooding severely affected his home). He is going to start working on setting up a literacy project in the town where the Thai Pads are made (he worked there many years ago!), so that is very exciting! I will keep updating you as things move along. I think many of our members in Thailand are still recovering from the flooding, but hopefully this project will start becoming more concrete in the near future.

All the best.

Sincerely,
Amy Kusher
Program Officer, Global Operations
International Reading Association

-----Original Message-----
From: uthai piromruen
Sent: Monday, January 09, 2012 9:32 AM
To: Amy Kushner
Cc: Uthai Piromruen; pat ratana
Subject: Re: Special funds for Thailand Reading Association

Dear Amy

It is exciting to receive your mail with good news about Thai Pad.

I'm sorry for my delay in responding to you due to the great flood in Thailand. The first floor of our house was flooded and all books on wooden shelves were dissolved in the water. I took pity for myself that my precious belongings---books from my readers' digest collection which I brought from USA, long time ago were disappeared. This flood destroyed my literacy asset. When I heard that Thai Pad has become a popular book stall for reading and literacy from Levenger, it brought me joy that there is something to compensate for my great loss in the flood this year.

I think I know the place where the product was made. In fact, I used to be in that area long time ago--as a local primary school teacher.

It's great that Levenger Company has their keen eyes in giving supports for literacy. I will relate the story to my colleagues at Thailand Reading Association. We are happy to collaborate with IRA to set up a literacy project in the village where the Thai Pad was made and becoming well-known.

Thank you very much for giving us this good news. I'll let you know soon of how we work together to use the fund from Levenger's donation.

May you also have a Happy Season's Greeting with Joyful Blessing and Happiness throughout the year 2012.

Uthai Piromruen
Thailand Reading Association

Occasionally people scratch their head and say to me, “Just what exactly do you mean by a well-read life?” The next time someone asks, I’m going to show them this email.

Happy 2012 to you, dear reader, and thank you for helping to make dreams come true.

My Holiday Wish List for Our Customers

That you have all the joy that you can wish, to borrow from Shakespeare, both in this season and in your endeavors. At Levenger we take joy in our own endeavors—bringing you products that we hope will help you in yours.

That you know Levenger will continue to be a company that practices conscious capitalism. We will partner with institutions that foster learning and literacy, and seek out responsible suppliers the world over.

That what you find at Levenger will be not just good stuff but the stuff of ideas: products that inspire you to pursue whatever forms your creative expression takes. 

That you will count on us to always be the company that will do right by you, so that shopping with us is a delight for you. (And I’m counting on you to tell us if it isn’t.)

That you accept our gratitude for caring that a product is well made and thoughtfully executed. For knowing the value of owning good things made to last. For having expectations that make us raise the bar that much higher to meet them.  

You have brought such meaning into the lives of the people of Levenger. I hope we have done the same, and then some, for you.

Happy holidays,