Legal pads: whence?

By Todd Stadler · Wednesday, January 9, 2008 11:17pm

Recently, a coworker sent me an email which she ended with a digressive series of questions on legal pads:

Why are legal pads yellow? And why are they lined that way? Is it because those legal types like yellow, skinny-lined paper? I've always wondered.

The following was my reply:

At one point bleached white paper was only used by royalty, in part because white — associated with purity or power — was reserved for kings, and also because bleached paper was rather difficult (and therefore expensive) to make back in those days.

Anyone else who wanted to use paper had to use lower-quality unbleached paper, which in those days was usually fairly brown or yellow. This paper was "legal" for common people to use.

Of course, back then, there were not a lot of people with need for paper, as precious few could read or write. But the emerging middle class brought with it higher literacy rates as well as a new employment class that did have a need for paper: lawyers.

Of course, lawyers of that time were all too aware of the prohibition on white paper for common use, but even to this day — given the rich history of tradition in the world of law — lawyers prefer to use paper that is "legal", even if the monarchies that caused this development ended long ago.

Of course, I made that answer up out of whole cloth — it's utter rubbish. But it sounds good, doesn't it? I was pretty proud of it.