Staples through the years

It's 1839. A clerk of the probate court is halfway through his day. It's July, so the heat is bearing down on him. No electricity, no fans, no air conditioning. His window is open. He's riffling through sheaves of paper related to a particular case, and some of those pages are especially related to each other, but the information won't all fit on a single sheet. What is he to do?

Today, we might use a stapler to punch through the paper with a narrow wire to clinch the pages together. So this clerk used what he had at hand: a straight pin. He then bundled the pages into their file, dropped them into a drawer, and in 2021, archivist Lyle Johnston removed the pin as part of his process to stabilize and continue to preserve the documents in this folder.

But Lyle saved the pin for me.

The straight pins I'm more accustomed to are the collection I have at home, used mostly for sewing, or cutting splinters out of fingertips. They're considerably newer than the 19th century examples, and less rusty.

That's why we remove metal fasteners from documents at the Archive Center. We monitor humidity levels here, but this building is only about 20 years old, so files older than that were once in different conditions. It's an ongoing project, removing staples and paper clips from court records, such as divorces, estate papers and lawsuits.

We use specialized paper clips made of archival-quality plastic if we absolutely must group documents together, but we try to avoid that. One, the clips cost money. Two, if a document is in a folder, we know it's associated with the other documents. It's generally not necessary to bind them -- and the staples take up space. As the county government offices continue to generate more documents, space is at a premium.

Even a string from an 1841 document needed to go. Pressure on the document could cause small rips, which are bad.

The 1860s brass pieces held paper together just fine, but their tarnish would rub off on the pages, which fortunately was far enough away from the document's contents to not cause loss of information. We still remove them.

In a stack of mechanics' liens (that's a court action taken for nonpayment on a construction project, typically speaking, nothing to do with a vehicle mechanic), I found what I think was a rubber band from about 1917, and what was left of it had turned black and powdery.

It was stuck to the paper, so I had to be exceedingly careful with my metal spatula to get between the paper and the calcified rubber band, and gently, gently slide the offending substance off.

That's turned me off of using rubber bands for anything, ever, myself, and if I ever give advice to people putting documents away for safekeeping, that's my first suggestion: Don't use rubber bands, or staples, or paper clips, and if you can, unfold pages before storage.