The fields in student notebooks are well known to any person who studied at school. However, not everyone will be able to tell right away what fields are needed in a notebook at all. The answer to this question turns out to be quite interesting and not as unambiguous as it might seem.
Notebook margins - a place for notes and comments
Even if there are no fields printed in the notebook in the printing house, pupils at school still have to draw them. And this is not so much a tribute to beauty as a necessity - the fields are primarily intended so that the teacher, checking the performance of tasks by the student, could leave some comments on them, make notes, etc. In addition, the presence of fields better structures the text, making it easier to read.
The width of the fields can be different, usually 4-5 cells. As a rule, they are drawn along a ruler with a pencil or fountain pen, the color of which is different from that used for writing. For example, the fields can be red, green. Most often they are made in red, this color is usually used for printed fields as well.
It should be noted that drawing fields disciplines the student, teaches him to work with a ruler and pencil. By the quality of the fields drawn in the notebook, one can indirectly judge the student's attitude to learning.
How the fields appeared
Fields appeared in handwritten books, initially they had two main purposes. The first has already been mentioned above - the fields were used for notes and comments. But the second purpose of the fields was more interesting. Books in ancient times were quite a rarity, they were kept at times for hundreds of years and were read literally to the core. The edges of the sheets of the book, when they were turned over, gradually loosened and erased. If any text was present at them, it would simply be lost. Therefore, the creators of the books left the margins to protect the text from loss.
The need for fields was also dictated by another rather specific circumstance - books often became available to mice and rats, gnawing at their edges. In this case, the presence of fields made it possible to save the text. And although now the damage by rodents to books, not to mention student notebooks, has become irrelevant, the presence of fields still reliably protects the text from any damage.
The appearance of the fields was also influenced by purely aesthetic moments. In ancient books, the first letter of the first sentence was often large, written in an ornate script - such a letter was called a drop cap. Because of the drop cap, the first line of text was slightly omitted, and a field appeared on top. To make the text on the page look organic, it was necessary to make similar margins at the bottom and sides of the text.
Considering all of the above circumstances, books and notebooks are still supplied with margins. And if there are no such fields in the purchased notebook, the student still has to draw them and use them for their intended purpose.
