The legal pad got its start with Thomas Holley in 1888. Holley was 24 and working at a paper mill in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Every day, he and his co-workers threw out a lot of scrap¹ pieces, called sortings, left over from cutting paper into the right sized sheets. He knew there had to be a use for them and eventually hit on the idea of cutting the sortings to the same size and binding² them into small notepads. Since the paper was essentially³ trash to the mill, they could sell the pads at low prices.

1888年，Thomas Holley创造了信笺。24岁的他在马萨诸塞州霍利约克的一家造纸厂工作。每天他和同事们都会扔掉很多被称为“边角余料”的废料，这些废料是将纸张切成合适大小的尺寸后剩下的部分。他知道它们一定有用武之地，最终想到了一个好点子，就是把这些“边角余料”切成统一尺寸并装订成记事本。因为这些纸张对造纸厂来说就是垃圾，所以他们可以以很低的价格出售这种小本子。

The first few batches⁴ of pads sold so well that Holley quit his job at the mill and started his own company—Ampad, or the American Pad and Paper Company—to collect scraps⁵ from the local mills and manufacture and sell his pads. His company still exists, and they still manufacture notepads in a variety of sizes and shapes. And colors.

最初的几批记事本卖得非常好，以至于Holley辞去了造纸厂的工作，成立了自己的公司Ampad（即美国记事本及纸业公司），从当地造纸厂收集废料后，生产、销售小记事本。这家公司目前仍然存在，仍在生产各种大小和形状，还有不同颜色的记事本。

The pads that Holley made probably weren't yellow, and that isn't the only color they come in today. The only thing that technically⁶ sets the legal pad apart from every other notepad is the 1.25-inch, left-side "down lines," or margins⁷. According to a historical deep-dive on legal pads in a 2005 issue of Legal Affairs magazine, Holley added these lines "in the early 1900s at the request of a local judge who was looking for space to comment on his own notes."Holley最初生产的记事本可能不是黄色的，且黄色也不是现在记事本的唯一颜色。从技术上讲，唯一能将信笺与其他记事本区别开来的是纸张左侧1.25英寸的“划线”，即页边空白。根据2005年出版的《法律事务》杂志上的一篇关于信笺历史的深度报道，Holley在“20世纪初应一位当地法官的请求”加上了这些线，“这位法官想让自己的笔记有做批注的地方”。

Still, when most people think legal pad, they think of the classic yellow paper and blue lines. The true origin of the yellow hue⁸ is actually a mystery. As far as we know, Holley's pads were white pads, and dyeing them yellow would have upped his cost and ruined his business plan.

不过，当大多数人想到便笺时，他们想到的就是经典的黄纸蓝线。黄色色调的真正起源实际上是一个谜。据我们所知，Holley的信笺是白色的，如果把它们染成黄色会增加他的成本，进而破坏他的商业计划。

There are a few competing hypotheses about how the pads came to be yellow later on, but none can be verified and no one seems to know when the pads first came out in color. One origin story suggests that yellow contrasted well against black ink without glare, making text easier to read. Or, that from a psychological perspective, "yellow is an excellent color for stimulating⁹ mental activity," so writing on yellow notepads could boost your creativity or clarity.

关于信笺后来是如何变成黄色的，有一些假说都很有道理，但没有一个能够得到证实，似乎也没有人知道信笺是什么时候开始变成黄色的。一个说法是，黄色与不反光的黑色墨水形成了极好的对比，这让阅读文本变得更容易。或者，从心理学的角度来看，“黄色是刺激精神活动的绝佳颜色”，所以在黄色信笺上写字可以激发你的创造力或思辨力。

Another possibility is that Holley or his successors eventually decided¹⁰ to dye the paper to hide the fact that the pads were made from scraps of varying age and quality, and yellow was the cheapest or most readily available dye at the time.

另一种可能性是，Holley或他的继任者最终决定将纸张染色，以掩盖信笺纸是由不同年代和质量的边角余料制成的事实，而黄色是当时最便宜或最易得的染料。