I am looking at a mini-notebook, 60x100mm, containing 50 sheets of high quality plain white shiny paper. It has a pretty light blue cardboard cover, laminated or coated to give it a reasonable water resistance. In the bottom left hand corner is a white outline drawing of a rhinoceros. At the top of the back cover are some postage stamp size adverts for the registered charity, Save The Rhino & at the bottom a bar code, a reference number & a web site address, reference to which tells me that it comes from an old-established company in Northern Ireland which has a manufacturing office in Estonia. I think it was priced at 50p when I bought it in Ryman’s about a year ago, but I got a three-for-two offer.
When I was a child paper was precious, husbanded carefully & gratefully received as presents for birthdays or Christmas. This was in part because of post war austerity, but partly because of folk memories of a time when paper really was an expensive & valuable commodity, out of reach of the pockets of many. Think of how frugal were the old maids of Cranford. And if you ever get to examine letters written by ordinary Victorians much later in the century, after the abolition of paper duty, you will see that, although they usually start laid out with header & margins, if they reach the end of the (very small) sheet & have yet more to say they will continue writing all the way round the borders – the sort of letter which today you would immediately assume came from a member of the loony brigade.
Today we take paper completely for granted, even if soon to be totally redundant when we finally reach the goal of a paperless world holding information only in electronic formats. My notebook is the kind of small cheap everyday object whose loss I probably would not notice or mourn. At least not before I began to fill it with my infinitely precious notes.
We are often these days enjoined to think hard about where the food we eat & the clothes we wear come from, but rarely of all the other products which we are privileged enough to believe are just part of life, readily available, the way things are supposed to be. We probably have some left over yearnings for a romantic past where an individual craftsman gained satisfaction from making objects from first to last by his own hand & entirely of his own conception.
And yet there is tremendous romance, & something awe inspiring, about all the processes & people which had to link together to give me this one small thing.
The paper & card started as a tree in some Nordic forest, but where did the blue for the cover come from?
At least one designer must have imagined how it would look, chosen the images & typefaces. Although it is not a standard A size format, there is presumably some kind of formal or informal agreement over sizing to make life easier for all those who have to handle, transport, store & display such products. But where does the bar code come from? Do you have to apply to some kind of central registry, so that there is no chance of a till mistaking my notebook for a tin of shoe polish?
Where did the little (plastic?) spiral binding in a very well chosen shade of french navy come from? Where is the factory that makes them & what kind of people work there? How much work might have been involved for the charity, deciding whether this was an association/sponsorship which they were happy to be involved with?
How did my notebook travel to England?
And then of course there are all those involved with the management & running of the two companies which I know were involved in this process, to make sure the notebook was on the shelf of a conveniently placed store at the time I wanted, perhaps on a whim, to buy it.
Will I be able to find new ones when I need them soon – plain paper mini-notebooks are surprisingly hard to find, & lined paper just does not suit my working method.
Just how many people do I depend on to provide me with this one small object? What, if anything, do I owe to them, apart from a few pence?
And what would that multiply up to if I repeated such a detailed contemplation of all the other objects in my life?
I never forgot someone telling me that there were two ways to make real money as a shopkeeper. One was to specialise in something rare, expensive & desirable (Louis Quatorze antiques). You would need expensive premises, exquisitely arranged; customers would be rare, you would make few sales a year, but each sale would give you a very handsome profit. Your cash flow would be very lumpy; you need a cushion to get started & to see you through the lean times. A trade for a knowledgeable gentleman, hardly a trade at all really.
The other way was to specialise in things which everybody needs, piling them high & selling them cheap; your profit on each sliced white loaf might be only a fraction of a penny, but a million customers a day would see you in clover. Cash flow would be healthy, initial investment minimal, provided you had the common touch & the right kind of gifts as a salesman.
Some businesses combine both. For example the cinema; Marilyn Monroe earned large sums of money because millions of people were willing to pay heir pennies to see her unique talent in films. But those pennies could only be garnered through an expensive industry infrastructure of studios, cinemas, distribution networks & publicity. Others earned the handsome profits due to such hefty investments of cash.
In the world we live in, where my being able to buy just one mini-notebook depends upon many others in a complex, interconnected web, which needs the lubricant of money & finance to keep it going, bankers get it both ways. Whether providing what, in their terms, are tiny everyday amounts of working capital, overdrafts, payment services & finance for overseas trade, or the big stuff needed for investment in transport infrastructure, factories & high-priced machines, they earn both the pennies & big handsome wodges.
No wonder their bonuses are so big.
