Well-Read Life™

The Time-at-Home Book Bonus

My father was ordered to the Philippines during World War II but got lucky: while he was shipping over, the war ended. When he and his buddies arrived in Manila, they were given work to keep them busy, including scraping barnacles off the bottom of Navy ships—right before said ships were to be scuttled. “Welcome to the Navy!” he told me.

Each morning, my dad and his fellows would walk from their barracks over to the notice board to see if their name appeared, ordering them home. But while his friends were getting their orders, my father’s name didn’t appear. Days turned into weeks. When there was no busy work left and the number of sailors dwindled, my dad was told to stay out of trouble.

There was a small library on base, so my father started reading books. “I never read so much in my life,” he told me many years later. A broad smile came over his face as he remembered. “I read plays, classics, contemporary stuff.” For most of the day he would lie in his hammock reading, until one morning, more than two months after he arrived, he finally did find his name on the notice board. The Navy hadn’t forgotten about him after all. 

Today, in our unplanned time at home, we have more options than my father did. While many of us work via our computers, or help teach our children at home, and all of us want to stay up with the news, I hope you can also find some time to escape to your reading hammock.

In case you’re interested in a few suggestions, here are five ways for you to take a deep breath and breathe in a book...

No. 1: Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World by Laura Spinney

If you think we’ve got it tough (and we do), wait till you read what our great-grandparents had to contend with. When the Spanish flu attacked (spoiler alert: it didn’t come from Spain), the world was a century behind where we are today in science. British science journalist Laura Spinney takes us back into that even darker time, to the rumors and desperation, as well as to the lasting impact this worldwide debacle had on public health, art and literature. 

 

No. 2: Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations by Amy Chua

 You’ve probably heard of the Tiger Mom. Would you believe Amy Chua is also a Tiger Scholar? I had a chance to hear her present her work on modern tribalism and then devoured this book. Finally, I think I understand the basis of the political turmoil we’ve been suffering through in America. Her chapters on Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq will break your heart—and elevate your understanding. 

 

No. 3: American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins

When I heard the author was criticized for not being the right sort of person to write such a book, I bought it. (Was Harriet Beecher Stowe the right sort of person to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin?) This suspenseful tale paints the inconvenient truth of how, for many migrants seeking El Norte, it’s not just to earn more money but because to stay in their homeland means death.

 

No. 4: The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

After Bel Canto, I now read everything Ann Patchett writes. If she offered her shopping list, I’d read it. It’s not just that her writing is beautiful. Of course it is. It’s that she is an indefatigable champion for other writers, for books, for bookstores and for readers. She is America’s Book Sweetheart. (And even if you think you don’t like audio books, listen to a sample of Tom Hanks reading, and you may change your mind.) By the way, Ann offers her own timely favorite books on the PBS News Hour here.

 

No. 5: La Casa de los Espíritus/The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende

 

For those of us learning another language, there are few things more valuable than reading just what interests you. And while the number of bilingual printed books is very limited, e-readers come to the digital rescue. I’ve been enjoying Isabel Allende’s dreamy The House of the Spirits in Spanish. But, since I get only most of what’s happening, I flip to the English version periodically. The ability to do this with electronic books is one of the literary blessings of our age. (Another are our literary translators.)

Stay safe, my friends, and I hope you can make do the way my dad did, and breathe in a good book or three. 

Yours,

P.S. Many Levenger customers over the years said to me, “I love the book stuff you guys sell; I just wish I had more time to read.” They inspired me to write The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life way back in 2005. It’s a short book designed to help readers get more books into their life, and more life from their books. It’s newly available as an e-book here.

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.

The CEO says thanks

It’s been a year, hasn’t it?

To all of you who have been part of the Levenger community this year, I thank you. From the start, we’ve been a company that knows the value and rewards of conversing with our customers. Who better to tell us whether we’re doing a good job?

As much as Levenger is about designing useful tools for the thoughtful life, we try to reach out to the well-read-life community in other ways as well. Through the Levenger Foundation, we’re able to support literacy on the local level and love of reading on the national level.

The Literacy Coalition of Palm Beach County, where Levenger is headquartered, works in remarkable ways to help the underserved in our community unlock the power and opportunities that come with being able to read. The National Book Foundation, in addition to sponsoring the National Book Awards, sponsors a nationwide Innovations in Reading program that helps to inculcate a love of reading among the young. I’m proud to serve as a volunteer for the former and on the board of the latter.

If 2009 was good for anything, it was to remind us of what is truly important and what can never be lost, taken away, canceled, downgraded, or eliminated. Our ability to read ignites our capacity to think and stirs our desire to do—to do the good, important work that each one of you does for your community and your family and yourself.

Here’s to more of such good work in 2010—to a life well-lived through reading. Here’s to you.

With gratitude,

Steve

P.S. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments.)