Loose leaf

A loose leaf is a piece of paper that is not bound in place, but typically punched so as to be organized in a ring binder. Loose leaves may be sold as free sheets, or made up into notepads, where perforations allow them to be removed easily.

Description

Typically loose leaf paper has straight blue lines with pink margin lines. This type of paper is normally sold in packs of 100 or 200 sheets and are not necessarily sold loose which means they can be torn out of notebooks with perforations. Loose leaf generally has three holes so that the piece of paper can fit into a three-ringed binder.

There are two common types of loose leaf paper: wide ruled and college ruled. College ruled paper has less space between the blue lines, allowing for more rows of writing. Wide ruled paper is intended for use by grade school children and those with larger handwriting.

The chief advantage of loose-leaf paper is its flexibility and economy in use. A punched sheet of paper can be inserted into a ring binder, removed for separate use, and then returned to the binder. Different sheets can be organized into a different order in a binder, or removed entirely and refiled in another binder, or disposed of as needed. This ability to rearrange and update the contents of binders is convenient for students and other workers, who can carry only the papers they are likely to need on a given day, while leaving the remainder elsewhere. The ability to add or remove an arbitrary number of pages has been useful for reference works that are frequently updated, such as computer software manuals, parts catalogs, and legal indexes.

The chief disadvantage of loose-leaf paper is that individual pages can be easily removed or lost due to tearing or wear of the punched holes. Adhesive hole reinforcements or sheet protectors are available to make pages more durable, and ring binders are often equipped with sheet lifters or other features to reduce wear and damage to their paper contents. Ring binders are sometimes banned from use for written journals, logs, or registers, which may even have pre-numbered permanently-bound pages to discourage removal of pages, or at least allow a removal to be detected.

History

Two early applications of looseleaf binding were Nelson's Perpetual Loose Leaf Encyclopaedia (1907) and legal textbooks updated through a looseleaf service (1914).

See also

• Filler paper
• Ruled paper
• Genkō yōshi
• Graph paper
• Hole punch
• Post-it note
• Paper size
• Ring binder

Resources

• History of Size
• International standard paper sizes
• Pre-Industrial Papermaking