They are the lowliest of office hardware, scattered through the IPA collection. But what stories they could tell of their interactions with famous fingers! Didn’t Albert Einstein, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the Hoovers (Herbert and J. Edgar) handle some of these very pages? I speak, of course, of the mundane paperclip. The rusting paperclip, bane of archivists. Now, after decades of joining what was not to be torn asunder, it’s time to retire these stationery workhorses, in the interest of protecting fragile onionskin and other brittle papers. (Don’t even get us started on staples, which are even more commonplace and damaging to remove, so we often leave them there.)

A little research turned up the fact that the ubiquitous, rounded-corner, double-rectangle spring clip may (or may not) have been invented by Norwegian patent clerk Johann Vaaler in 1899.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29139536

But there’s a world of paper fasteners beside paper clips, we found in processing our collection:

And we even found a site for the Early Office Museum that has a section devoted entirely to…fasteners!

http://www.officemuseum.com/staplers.htm