To students, they’re one of the most hated, despised and feared instruments of torture.

To some professors, they’re the most ruthlessly efficient way of extracting information from the panicked brains of row after row of college students.

To many TAs, they might as well be the book of the month – every month.

These last vestiges of the Inquisition live on college campuses all across this nation: the blue book.

You’ve all seen them, lying there in an organizer just beside the cash registers at a bookstore, or on a shelf at one of the C-Stores around campus. Perhaps you’ve even used one for a class or, at the very least, have been regaled with tales of their ruthlessly mind-numbing effectiveness in the exam room.

The standard blue book at Iowa State is produced by Roaring Spring Paper Products, of Roaring Spring, Pa. The company was founded in 1886 specifically to produce “blank books,” mostly ledgers, notebooks, journals and the like. Today, Roaring Spring employs approximately 330 people and manufactures a complete range of paper products in a modern 200,000-square-foot facility adjacent to nearly 450,000 square feet of warehouse space. The production of blue books is allocated its own dedicated production line within this facility.

Their parent company, also named Roaring Spring, is a major regional producer of corrugated containers, and also bottles Roaring Spring Premium Spring Water.

Jim Lucey, a representative of the company, said annual production of blue books is “in the millions.”

Lucey also said Roaring Spring has, more recently, introduced a version of the blue book made entirely of recycled material. It is referred to as a green book, and carries a green cover instead of the traditional pastel blue.

The most startling thing about blue books, however, is often their price tag.

Lucey also indicated that the average retail price of a blue book, in his estimation, was around 25 cents. Though not a bank-breaker, the University Bookstore and Campus Bookstore can generally be relied on to offer the delightfully pastel-clad six-page nemesis for around 27 and 24 cents, respectively, while a walk over to one of ISU Dining’s C-Stores will yield a price of 40 cents.

This represents a near doubling of price from many retail outlets that carry Blue Books (albeit in units of 1,000), among them Shoplet.com (15 cents), Business-supply.com (17 cents) and CompUSA (19 cents).

It should also be noted that, according to Lucey, several other institutions have been known to give blue books away for free, sometimes just simply leaving a box of them outside their door for the occasional after-hours emergency.

At a bare minimum, the C-Store price equates to something in the neighborhood of a 170 percent markup compared to Shoplet’s price for blue books. While the two bookstores are more modestly priced, their blue book markup still hovers in the 70 percent range.

The amount of money involved on the part of the blue book retailers is really quite insignificant. It is quite improbable that selling blue books at cost or even just giving them away would hurt their bottom lines significantly. Indeed, particularly in the case of the bookstores, simply giving away blue books could be seen as an excellent loss leader or other promotion to get students in the door.

– Ryan Frederick is a senior in

management from Orient.