I want one of these:

Instead using the tiny pieces of metal that add up to lots waste, this ingenious little device joins your papers by punching a small, neat hole in your documents and folding the remaining flaps together for a secure binding. No paper is torn off of your sheets and there’s nothing to toss out or pry apart with your fingernails. So simple, but so smart.

I wonder who invented the mechanism. These ones are also nice, and the top one works really well.

Posted by: Dawn Danby on January 2, 2005 5:06 PM

The picture and movie here:

http://www.virtualstapler.com/gallery/paperstapler.asp

show pretty clearly how these things work. I doubt it would scale to more than a dozen sheets at once. Also, it leaves a fair sized hole so if you want to unfasten and re-fasten a document I think you'd quickly run out of room in your preferred stapling corner. (And sheets once fastened this way seem unlikely to play nicely with a paper feeder, such as on a photocopier.)

But it's damn cool, and even if all my caveats are correct that still leaves plenty of uses. I may have to have one of these.

Posted by: sennoma on January 2, 2005 5:56 PM