The rat ate my homework
We have all seen them, we have all written on them and most of us respected the margin lines on our notebooks. Nowadays, we used them as an indicator of where to start writing and where to stop and pass to the next line. Teachers also make use of these margins to leave comments. Was it invented with this purpose?
Once again, let us take you back to the past and reveal the surprising origins of these margins. These margins were first added with the main purpose of protecting people’s work. In the past, books’ edges were one of the favorite chewing elements for mice, rats, and insects, so people’s pieces of information would get lost, as they tended to write all the way to the edge. Later on, people decided to leave empty spaces around the edges to prevent their work from being chewed on by rodents.