Have you thought about why the paragraph line starts from the inside in the notebooks given to us in primary school? Why do we leave spaces when writing in the notebook instead of starting from the very edge of the page and writing all the way to the other edge? It is certain that it looks more aesthetically pleasing visually and leaves room for our eyes to breathe, rather than seeing suffocating texts one after the other. But that’s not the only reason.
So why do books have blank pages at the end? Is it for the author to sign or for the reader to take notes? Why are these blank pages not found in every book and only in some?
Thanks to the paragraph lines inside, the writings in the notebooks could be protected from being eaten by mice.
There is an interesting reason why paragraph lines in notebooks start from the inside and do not extend to the edges of the notebook. In ancient times, rats were a big problem for books and notebooks, they could get into libraries and eat papers.
Paragraph lines were drawn from the inside to keep the text within the reach of mice. Thus, even if the mice ate some of it, the writing was prevented from disappearing completely.
This line is on the left, but not on the right. So why?
In modern times, when we don’t have to worry so much about mice anymore, the reason why the left line is preserved alone is our reading habits. This line acts as a beacon that directs the flow of reading to our eye.
The beginning of each new paragraph from the same line provides ease of reading. On the right side, there is no line, because the end points of the end-of-line words in texts may not be the same, and it may not be easy to maintain a straight line on the right side.
The blank pages at the end of the books, on the other hand, are not left to save you and scribble your thoughts when you do not take a notebook with you. The reason for these blank pages is related to the production process of the book.
Books are printed in large sheets, and each sheet usually contains 4 or 16 printed pages. If the number of pages of the book cannot be divided exactly by these layers, blank pages remain. These sheets are then cut and put together to form a book. In this process, the remaining blanks from large papers appear as blank pages.
Since leaving blank pages is a laborious task, they are usually left as they are.
This leaves blank pages at the end of the books, as it is much easier to leave them as they come out of the press instead of having to deal with separating each remaining blank page one by one.
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