The Humble Paper Clip’s Surprising History
From quirky collections to symbols of resistance, paper clips hold stories that span decades, continents, and even the Holocaust.
David Walker was downsizing, and he and his family faced the problem of what to do with his paper clip collection. His daughter found an unconventional solution. She contacted Present & Correct, a stationery shop in the UK. They were pleased to take Walker’s collection and display photos on their website.
A August 22, Present & Correct blog post says of their acquisition, “You know we love a clip!” The company clearly has a taste for quirky and vintage products. Not only do they sell stationery, but they also deal in vintage ephemera, offering labels, envelopes, stamps, and stickers from the 1950s to the 1990s.
Walker collected clips in various materials, shapes, and sizes worldwide. They are attached to scraps of paper, and many have dates, locations, or sources jotted beside them. There are clips from as early as the 1910s and from places like Spain, Scotland, Finland, Canadian provinces, and the U.S. Department of the Interior.
As Walker’s collection suggests, the paper clip has a longer, more complicated history than most of us might realize. The online Early Office Museum has a comprehensive “History of The Paper Clip,” including a list of patents for paper fasteners from 1867 onward. Over the years, a surprising amount of thought and innovation has gone into these simple implements.
Paper clips can even be poignant. In 1998, Whitwell Middle School in Tennessee started the Paper Clips Project. Under the guidance of their teacher and the school’s principal and assistant principal, a class studying the Holocaust collected six million paper clips to represent the six million Jewish people killed by the Nazis. The collection helped the students comprehend the scale of the tragedy. The project continued for years. In 2001, the school unveiled a Children’s Holocaust Memorial consisting of a German train car holding eleven million paper clips, the total number of the Nazis’ victims.
One reason why the students initially chose paper clips for the project was that they learned that, during World War II, Norwegians wore paper clips on their lapels as a subtle symbol of resistance against Nazi occupation. The Norwegian word for paper clips is “binders.” As a symbol, they stood for unity, or binding together, against adversity.
Who knew the humble paper clip could have so much meaning? Well, who else but collectors, of course.
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