Lucky you, reading this on a screen, in a warm and well-lit room, somewhere in the unparalleled comfort of the twenty-first century. But imagine instead that it’s 800 C.E., and you’re a monk at one of the great pre-modern monasteries — Clonard Abbey in Ireland, perhaps. There’s a silver lining: unlike most people, you can read. On the other hand, you’re looking at another long day in a bitterly cold scriptorium. Your cassock is a city of fleas. You’re reading this on parchment, which stinks because it’s a piece of crudely scraped animal skin, by the light of a candle, which stinks because it’s a fountain of burnt animal fat particles. And your morning mug of joe won’t appear at your elbow for a thousand years.

What could be worse than the cold, the fleas, the stink, and no coffee? Well. The script you are reading is minuscule, to save ink and space, and it’s written in scriptio continua. That’s right: you are plagued by headaches because spacesbetweenthewordsaremodernconveniencesthathavelikepunctuationandcoffeeandreadingglassesanddeodorantforthatmatternotyetbeeninvented. This is a constant source of difficultyambiguityfrustrationeyestrainanderrer.

Thank goodness for modernity, eh? Except for one strange fact. In our smugly “digital” age, our numbers are still waiting for modernity to happen.

My passport number is printed in a font three millimeters high in the middle of a cool white bath of space that would easily accommodate text four times larger. And, like all these numbers, it could have been printed in groups of three digits — but instead we get 210006647. Scriptio continua.

Would grouped passport digits, in a bigger font, make life easier for tens of millions of travelers? You can test this arcane theory yourself by acquiring a half-eaten sandwich, four shoulder bags, a sticky toddler with earache, a TSA security line with a broken scanner, skull-crushing jet lag, a small crumpled Customs Declaration, and a borrowed ballpoint that leaks. Now lean way forward until your head is upside down, balance your passport on one thigh, and decide which format your overtaxed human cognitive equipment prefers:

210006647

210 006 647