The ends of the year

 Three years ago, I read a review of the best pocket calendars and discovered mine didn’t make the list. Recently I learned that the Letts pocket calendar, the one I carry, was the first.

I knew that John Letts of London had started making them in 1812. What I learned from Roland Allen’s The Notebook was that the idea of a book with a printed grid of the days was new. It instantly caught on, although Letts had to make changes.

Then as now, Letts put each week on two facing pages. His first edition included only six days in each week on the theory that no good person would do business on the Lord’s Day. The next year’s edition made the obvious correction.

It seems to me that people who carry notebooks and pocket calendars tend to be conservative or unreasonably loyal to their brand or just reluctant to change. I’m among them. The faults of the Letts calendar don’t bother me.

I spend some time making changes — mainly pasting poems on the pages of information for international business travelers.

The 2025 edition has arrived, and so I will start fiddling with it. I have a lot of reminders to write in the calendar for the coming year.

I like this time of year — I mean the ends of the year, rather than the holidays. The reading and writing projects that are going to get done in 2024 are done, and I’m thinking about projects for the coming year. After Thanksgiving, I help the Wise Woman address, stamp and mail her holiday letter — just one of the things I do with the ends of the year. Getting the pocket calendar in order is another.

• Sources and notes: Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper; Windsor, Ontario: Biblioasis, 2024, pp. 257ff.  For an explanation of my system of keeping a calendar, see “An activity in lieu of making resolutions,” Dec. 31, 2021.