Eckenklammer corner clips

Photo by Diana Metzner

Today we have some sort of premiere at Bleistift. The first guest post (..if this counts as a guest post).

Photo by Diana Metzner

Diana, who in 1980 was my first English teacher, read my recent post about the Japan Clips and send me a photo and additional information about some other unusual clips she bought in the past, including the Eckenklammern from ALCO.

Diana wrote:

Here are the “Eckenklammer” corner clips, which I used as in 1,2,3. They are flatter than a normal paper clip and hold the paper tighter. I think they are only meant for 2 or three sheets, though, but they do look really good on “important” papers.

There seem to be at least three different version of the  corner clips available: brass-plated, nickel-plated and made from aluminium. A box with 100 corner clips usually retails for about €1.50 (~$1.95, ~£1.25), a box with 1000 retails for about €9.00 (~$11.70, ~£7.50).

As mentioned before Diana’s Eckenklammern were from ALCO, a family business established in 1906. They are also available from other companies and I assume that all the different corner clips come from the same manufacturer as they all seem to look the same.  They are size is 18 x 18 mm and about  0.25 mm thick.

I would like to thank Diana for making me aware of this product and for the photos and the explanation.

Prices and exchange rates: September 2010

Photo by Diana Metzner

OHTO Super Clip

Last time I was in Germany I discovered a second hand book shop in Würzburg that also displayed stationery in the shop windows. The stationery on display seemed to be a mix of items I have seen in Lexikaliker’s blog and in Manufactum’s catalogue, but there were also a few items I have not seen anywhere else.

Zerkall & Artesanos del Papel paper

Items I saw there for the first time included paper and envelopes from Zerkall Ingres, mouldmade in a paper mill dating to the 16th century, and cotton/linen paper from Artesanos del Papel in Alicante.

One of the items I bought in this book shop is a paper clip from OHTO, a paper clip looking a bit like a picture frame hanger. The informal name seems to be Japan-Clip. It can hold 20 sheets of 80g paper. The standard clip is nickel-plated, selling for 20c each (25¢, 16p), the posh version for 50c (63¢, 41p ) is 18K gold-plated.

Japan-Clips with Faber-Castell eraser on Banditapple carnet

The nice thing about these clips is that they still look good even if they hold many sheets of paper, while ordinary paper clips usually look unsightly if you squeeze too many sheets of paper in. On the other hand ordinary paper clips can hold more sheets of paper and seem to be softer to the paper. When you try to squeeze too many sheets of paper (> 25) into the Super Clip it can damage the paper slightly when you remove the paper clip again.

...compared to ordinary paper clips

 

After using OHTO’s Super Clips for a while I came to appreciate them as re-usable, temporary clips that hold paper together much better and tighter than ordinary paper clips. The fact that I have two different colours helps to distinguish similarly documents I am working with, e.g. two sets of statistics from different years.

Links:

I found this company selling Zerkall Ingres paper in the USA.

JetPens and Cult Pens do not seem this paper clip and I could not find an American or British online shop selling the Japanese paper clip. RSVP and Modulor are two German online shops that have the paper clip in stock and ship to most countries.

Prices and exchange rates: August 2010

I would like to thank Kent and Arnie for the Banditapple carnets used in the photos.