When did textbooks start being replaced by particolored monstrosities? I can imagine textbook marketers get excited over the additional appendices, and in-chapter supplements, and case studies showing ‘real world applications’, and highlight boxes, and end of chapter bulleted lists of important points, and outline boxes for each definition, and several figures per page, and that on top of it all each separate feature has its own color for quick identification… but I can’t imagine that readers are nearly as enamored of that clutter.

Remember the good old days when books used one color of ink– black–, and one font family, and because they cost so much, figures didn’t make the cut unless they were actually worth 1000 words? When textbooks didn’t need user manuals? I wasn’t around then, but I learned calculus from a book written in those times, and it outshines any modern calculus textbook I’ve seen with all their educational accoutrements. Likewise Feller far outshines any more modern probability text I’ve come across. Paradoxically, having to work within relatively spartan printing resources helped those authors to focus more on the content of the material than the presentation. It also seems that they were less worried with soft-selling their material: those texts have more gravitas than modern pulpy textbooks.

I wish we could return to those times. Or failing that, I wish I could locate an introductory macroeconomics text that doesn’t induce a migraine after reading several pages.