History
Looseleaf service is a form of publishing invented by Richard Prentice Ettinger in 1913, founder of Prentice Hall. As a 19-year-old assistant to his Princeton University tax professor he was awarded with the then lucrative task of publishing the professor's book at his own risk. The first print run sold well and he ordered a second print run from an outside printing company. On the very day that this second print run arrived the United States Congress changed the tax law enough that the book was outdated. Faced with this challenge Ettinger came up with the idea of cutting the pages (leaves) loose, replacing the few pages where changes in the tax code had occurred, drilling holes through the pages and putting them into a ring-binder. Even though it was more costly it did have the added benefit that all future changes of the tax code could easily be accommodated by simply exchanging a single leaf.
Read more about this topic: Loose Leaf
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“When the coherence of the parts of a stone, or even that composition of parts which renders it extended; when these familiar objects, I say, are so inexplicable, and contain circumstances so repugnant and contradictory; with what assurance can we decide concerning the origin of worlds, or trace their history from eternity to eternity?”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day
...
the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)