Every Sunday night, my mother piled dimes on top of quarters on the kitchen counter, making a grid of four rows, one for each of her children, and five columns, one for each school day. If asked, as a kindergartner, what makes a week, I’d have said five quarters and five dimes. There have been five-day weeks and eight-day weeks and ten-day weeks. What makes a Tuesday a Tuesday, and why does it come, so remorselessly, every seven days? A week is mostly made up. The sun makes days, seasons, and years, and the moon makes months, but people invented weeks. I haven’t bought a Letts of London since the second Obama Administration. Planning your week is what Google Calendar is for: Degree cmte (zoom), staff mtg, Mrs. “Self care for men should absolutely be a priority,” the company advises, marketing little books in which people can write about how they feel, not what they’re supposed to be doing. The company claims to be the inventor of the first commercially printed diary but says on its Web site, “We know how important it is for our products to evolve with the ever-changing times.” Some Letts diaries are now sold less for the planning of weeks than for the pursuit of wellness. The stationery store has long since disappeared-at the moment, it’s being turned into a day-care center-but Letts is still in business. (Spring break.) And, on every day that the Red Sox played at Fenway Park, I always wrote one word: Baseball. Don’t make meetings! I wrote to myself all over the last week of March, 2007, verso and recto. You can get them pretty cheap, and I used to buy a new one every November from a neighborhood stationery store on an annual pilgrimage in search of an ordered life. Early editions of Charles Dickens’s novels contained advertisements for Letts diaries.

On the back, the books are stamped “Made in Great Britain” and “Letts of London,” the trademark of a printing house and bookbindery established in 1796.

The books have printed, on the left-hand page, the days of the week from Monday to Wednesday and, on the right, from Thursday to Sunday, and my favorite ones come with a red silky ribbon bookmark, a lolling tongue, glued into the binding. In a sagging desk drawer crammed with Magic Markers that have lost their magic, a rubber-banded collection of expired passports, and user manuals for printers I no longer use or even own, I keep a stash of decades-old wallet-size leather-bound appointment books marked with now meaningless meetings, obsolete assignations, assorted obligations, and inscrutable notes to self: Dept mtg, lunch w/Leah, S to dentist, cancel $14.9.

Books a million daily calendar