Saturday, January 05, 2008

Staple Free

Back in 1990, I stumbled upon a fun store in San Francisco that specialized in products for the newly revitalized ecology movement. (Remember 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth?) I bought a reusable linen coffee filter -- for years, I drank coffee that tasted like a t-shirt -- and a set of paper stencils and glow-in-the-dark paint to put an astronomically accurate map of the night sky on my ceiling. The store also had a really cool paper fastener, which punched and folded tabs on your papers to hold them together without staples. I was a grad student and the stencil was setting me back $25, so I didn't buy one. But then later, when I had money, I couldn't find one.

Then last weekend, I found this as in impulse item while waiting in line at the Container Store. I bought two. It only fastens 5 sheets of paper, but it's just so cool. It punches a little tab and slit in your paper, folds the tab back, and tucks it into the slit. Other models are available at the manufacturer, Made By Humans.

6 comments:

micah said...

that thing is neat! I think my boss would die if I started punching holes in stuff at the office though!!!

--S. said...

Cool! I remember a teacher in elementary or middle school showing us a similar way to fasten pages together manually, and I occasionally still use that method. Plus, my stapler has started to malfunction, so this would help reduce the general level of swearing at my desk.

Cat Herself said...

I bought one of those things about 4 years ago. As you say, it only handles about 4-5 sheets of paper at the most (and god forbid it should be thicker paper!), and it wore out fairly quickly. Also, if you wanted to read the papers again, it would not hold up to being handled and re-handled very many times before the little tab of paper ripped.

I still liked it, though, for some jobs. I wonder, though, if the plastic and manufacturing of this little gizmo is out-weighed by the few staples you'll save.

All that said, it's still a very cool little gizmo.

FiberQat said...

My sock LYS uses that for attaching the card slip to the receipt. Very cool.

Anonymous said...

Cool staple thing.

A burning question - If you reread a book, do you add it to your yearly list?

yarmando said...

Yeah, I'll count it again, but I probably won't put it in the running for my "best" list.