I'm reading "Just-So Tech Stories: How the 8.5" x 11" Piece of Paper Got Its Size/The unfortunate size of office paper is why we double-space our documents" (in The Atlantic) because I bought a made-in-France Clairefontaine spiral notebook and wondered why it wasn't 8 1/2 by 11 inches — it's 8 1/4 by 11 3/4. I felt so awkward with it. It seemed perverse. I really did have that sense that 8 1/2 by 11 is "naturally occurring."

But — according to this article —  8 1/2 by 11 really isn't naturally good for reading. A magazine that wide would use 2 or 3 columns per page to help the eye get from the end of a line to the beginning of the next line. And that's why we double space, to make the beginning of the next line easier to see.

Why do we use a paper size that is so unfriendly for the basic task of reading? According to a very interesting post by Paul Stanley, the rough dimensions of office paper evolved to accommodate handwriting and typewriters with monospaced fonts, both of which rendered many fewer characters per line. "Typewriters," he explains, "produced 10 or 12 characters per inch: so on (say) 8.5 inch wide paper, with 1 inch margins, you had 6.5 inches of type, giving ... around 65 to 78 characters." This, he says, is "pretty close to ideal."

Of course, I'm using my spiral notebook for handwriting, and I produce about 30 characters per line. That should be perfectly easy to read, but I'm less interested in how easy it is to read than in whether my arm feels normal when I'm reaching up to the top lines. That suggests that notebooks should come in different sizes the way men's shirts come with different sleeve lengths.

MORE: Wikipedia has an article "Letter (paper size)." Excerpt:

Ronald Reagan made this the paper size for U.S. federal forms in the early 1980s; previously, the smaller "official" Government letter size, 8.0 by 10.5 inches... was used in government, while standard 8.5 × 11 inch paper was used by most other offices....

The precise origins of the dimensions of US letter size paper (8.5 × 11 in) are not known. The American Forest & Paper Association says that the standard US dimensions have their origin in the days of manual paper making, the 11" length of the standard paper being about a quarter of "the average maximum stretch of an experienced vatman's arms."

Ah! So it is about arms! An experienced vatman's arms. You can see why that extra 3/4 of an inch feels awkward to me, since I am not an experienced vatman.