A composition book may seem like a simple thing, but it can unlock a world of possibilities for you.

For jotting down notes, sketching lifes, or just capturing your thoughts, people love a marbled composition notebook. These composition books have been a staple of schools and nightstands for decades. No one holds any copyright to the design, and so a variety of manufacturers have circulated their own version of the familiar black-and-white bound notebooks . However where did they get started?

For answers, we need to look back to 10th-century China. That’s when the practice of marbling pages came into widespread use. With traditional marbling, pages are hand-dipped in a solution consisting of various pigments. The result is a page that takes on a one-of-a-kind psychedelic pattern, with swirls and loops acting as an artistic flourish. People would then print over them. This type of marbling continued for centuries, with manufacture moving from Turkey to Western Europe and eventually to England, where publishers used the technique to add unique designs to book covers or bindings.

Also with publishing grew increasingly automated, the appetite for handmade designs remained. Eventually, industrial methods of marbling were used, making mass production of such designs possible. It's not likely composition notebook popularity will ever abate. Since many composition books have stitched binding, they can be studier than your average notebook and may result in fewer lost or torn pages. Unlike ringed notebooks, they’re not likely to get snagged in backpacks or in drawers. Thanks to ruled pages, they also allow users to linearly organize their information.