The Radical Fringe

Some thoughts about spiral notebooks, and their byproducts. Plus a new Inconspicuous News Roundup, and more!

Last week I wrote about a bunch of to-do lists that I had recently rediscovered in a file cabinet after acquiring them 10 years earlier. As you probably noticed, the list pages featured lots of paper fringe (shown above), because they’d been torn out of a spiral notepad.

I’ve been keeping the lists in a plastic bag. But each time I’ve taken them out — to read them, study them, photograph them, show them to friends, and so on — a few pieces of the fringe have fallen off the pages and remained in the bag. Similarly, although I’ve tried to be careful when handling the lists, just about any interaction with them has resulted in some fringe residue being shed.

A recent instance of paper fringe being left behind in the plastic bag.

This fringe loss makes me a bit sad each time it happens. The list collection is an artifact of sorts, and I always hate the thought of damaging or altering an artifact in any way. Moreover, the fringe is an evocative detail that makes the lists’ story feel more robust, more vivid. When you see the fringe hanging off of a list sheet, you can almost feel the sheet being torn out of the notepad.

After I photographed all the lists, this fringe residue was left on my floor.

As I thought about all of this, I realized I hadn’t actually torn a page out of a spiral binding in decades. So I went out, got myself a standard spiral notebook, and began tearing sheets out of it. This prompted a weird series of flashbacks — that familiar pop-pop-pop sensation of the pages coming out of the notebook one little segment at a time was enough to transport me back to my childhood bedroom, my junior high cafeteria, and several other long-ago settings. It turns out you can go home again: You just need a spiral notebook.