Bostitch Model G27W Plier-Style Staple Remover, Chrome-Plated Steel with Sprung Jaw, c. 1975

The Piece

A plier-style staple remover in bright chrome-plated steel. The upper handle is pressed into a long spoon curve with BOSTITCH raised in block capitals across the top, and it sits on a broad flared base plate that gives the tool a wide, stable footprint on a desk. Between them, a coil spring holds the jaws open until you press down.

The working end is two narrow steel blades that meet in a shallow V. You set the tool over a staple, squeeze once, and the blades slide beneath the crown and lift it straight up. It is a lever, a spring, and two edges, and there is nothing in it to fail.

History & Provenance

Bostitch began in 1896 as the Boston Wire Stitcher Company, founded in Arlington, Massachusetts by Thomas Briggs around a machine that stitched books from a coil of wire. The firm took the name BOSTITCH in 1948 — a compression of Boston and stitch — and moved to East Greenwich, Rhode Island in 1957, where it is still headquartered. It has been owned by Textron, then Stanley Works, and now Stanley Black & Decker.

The plier-style remover is the better of the two designs on the market. The familiar alternative — the small hinged claw with four teeth — works by prying, which tears paper and bends staples into shapes that are worse than what you started with. This one lifts from beneath the crown instead, so the staple comes out intact and the sheet underneath survives. Anyone who has spent a day going through a filing cabinet knows the difference immediately.

We should be straightforward about age: this is not an antique. The base is stamped MODEL G27W and MADE IN TAIWAN, and the G27W has been in production for a long stretch and is still made. What it is instead is a properly engineered tool from a company that has been making fastening equipment for well over a century, in a form that has not needed to change.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Most desk tools sold now are moulded plastic in a colour someone chose to match a catalogue page. This is chromed steel with a spring in it, and it will still be working when the plastic ones have cracked at the hinge. If you handle paper — files, contracts, tax records, anything stapled and later unstapled — it is the correct tool for the job and it costs almost nothing.

It also looks like something. Sitting on a desk beside a brass lamp or a leather blotter, the curve of the handle and the flare of the base read as considered rather than disposable. A note on care: keep it dry, since chrome over steel will spot if it sits damp, and put a drop of light oil on the pivots once a year if it starts to feel stiff. Do not use it as a pry bar for anything other than staples — the blades are ground thin and they are the one part you could ruin.