Not a fan of paper clips? Wish your stapler had an infinite supply of staples? The Paper Fix is a stapler-substitute that binds paper together using just the paper itself.

Years ago I had a Japanese student who would turn in his papers “stapled” by a tiny perforation in the corner of the pile with a ribbon of the paper itself hooking them all together. He had brought the device from Japan and I was never able to locate one in the United States. Over at the CoolTools blog, they found one years ago in Germany—apparently every other country gets cooler office gadgets than the U.S.—and just recently found a version for sale here in the US.

The design is simple. It looks like a futuristic stapler, but you never load it. You use it just like a stapler, except instead of little wires binding the, paper the paper itself is folded and compressed to hold to itself. It does have a few shortcomings: you can’t unbind it easily because removing any paper in the bundle breaks up the neat little fold that holds it together, and it’s only good for up to 6 pages or so.

That said, it’s environmentally friendly, cheap to use, and a great solution for binding together small papers without any additional bulk.

Staple-Free Stapler

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