The Origin and History of Loose Leaf Paper and Notebook
There are numerous types and sizes of papers available across the world and the sizes are standardised by the ANSI or the American National Standards Institute. In addition to standardising the paper sizes, the ANSI also standardizes power tools, bank checks etc. You must have heard or used different varieties of paper sizes such as A1, A2, A4 etc. Besides this, there are different sizes of papers used for different purposes like letter-size paper or legal-size paper, architecture paper etc. Similarly, there is a type of paper called loose-leaf is a paper which is not bound by spiral bind or not bound with glue is called loose leaf paper especially in the US. You can also find loose leaf paper worldwide as well as loose leaf notebooks from 123ink and in many stores and suppliers.
The origin of loose leaf paper has a historical and interesting happening which took place in the year 1913, and since then the loose leaf paper, as well as the notebooks, occupy the top place almost in every back-to-school list. The story of loose leaf paper begins with Richard Prentice Ettinger when he was working with W. Gerstenberg in 1913 as a law clerk. They wrote a book on the topic of corporate finance and published the book on credit.
But, unfortunately, they were stuck with the already written volumes on federal tax laws because of rapid and drastic changes of the law and their written volumes became outdated as soon as they were printed. The perplexed Ettinger did not know what to do and tried to make up the book by removing and replacing the outdated pages and drilled holes through the rest of the volumes and made them into a three ring-binder. This is how Ettinger created the loose-leaf book which became popular in the later stages of the period.
The loose leaf is usually shrink-wrapped with 100 to 200 sheets of papers and normally comes in two types namely wide rule and college rule. The wide rule is primarily for young students with adequate space between the lines so that the young students can write easily with their large handwritings. On the other hand, the college rule is basically for high school or college students with narrow lines. However, you can find loose leaf notebooks in many varieties with as many as 59 types andlargely used especially in the US as well as almost in every country across the world.
