Swingline Heavy-Duty Desk Stapler in Grey Enamel with Chrome Domed Plunger, Long Island City, New York, c. 1956–1970

The Piece

A heavy-duty desk stapler built the way office equipment was built when it was expected to outlast the person using it. The body is pressed and cast steel finished in a soft grey-sage enamel, long and low, with the base flaring out at the front into a wedge. The whole thing has weight in the hand that no modern stapler has.

The plunger is capped with a wide chrome dome, mirror-bright, engraved across the face in the Swingline script. It is the detail that makes the object — a spun metal disc where a plastic button would go now, and the one part designed to be looked at rather than used.

The magazine housing is cast with its own instructions in raised letters: USE ONLY GENUINE Swingline NO. 13 HIGH CARBON STAPLES, 13-1/4″, 13-3/8″, 13-1/2″. Three staple lengths, which is what makes this a heavy-duty machine rather than a desk toy — the half-inch leg will go through a substantial stack.

The underside is cast Swingline Inc. / LONG ISLAND CITY, N.Y. / PAT. NO. 2,150,974 / MADE IN U.S.A., and carries two large crosshatched non-slip pads. A small paper label remains on the front face of the base.

History & Provenance

Swingline is a New York story. The company was founded by Jack Linsky, a Russian immigrant who had worked as a stapler salesman and concluded he could build a better one, and it manufactured in Long Island City for most of the twentieth century in a plant that became a neighbourhood landmark.

The base casting dates the machine, and cleanly. It reads Swingline Inc. — but the company did not carry that name for most of its history. It traded as the Speed Products Company, and only took the Swingline name, after its best-selling product line, in 1956. A base cast “Swingline Inc.” therefore cannot predate that change. Combined with the grey enamel, the chrome dome and the American manufacture, the range below is c. 1956–1970.

The patent number is a separate thing and worth not misreading. Pat. No. 2,150,974 is a design patent from the late 1930s, and manufacturers went on casting an active patent number into a product for as long as the patent stood. It dates the mechanism's invention, not this example's manufacture.

The name on the magazine is also a staple designation, not a model name: a Swingline No. 13 is a heavy-duty staple, and a machine calling for one is built for the work. That is the difference between this and the small chrome-topped desk staplers of the same era that everybody recognises.

Long Island City turns up twice over in objects of this period, which is worth noting: it was a dense manufacturing district shipping to the whole country, and a great deal of what sat on American desks and shelves in the mid-century was made within a few blocks of here.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Desks have become soft — plastic, light, disposable. One heavy grey steel object with a mirrored chrome cap fixes that in a single move. It anchors a desktop the way a good paperweight does, and it does it while remaining a tool rather than an ornament.

The colour is unusually easy to place. Grey-sage enamel and chrome sit with walnut, oak, leather, black steel and painted metal equally well, and the palette reads as period without reading as costume. On a bookshelf, a studio bench, a shop counter or a home office it is a small piece of industrial design that most people will pick up.

For a shop it prices as an impulse object with a recognisable name on it, and the Swingline script on that chrome dome does most of the selling before anyone reads a card.

A note on care. Keep it dry — the body is enamelled steel and the exposed chips will rust if it sits somewhere damp. Dust it with a dry cloth. On the chrome dome use nothing abrasive: no metal polish, no cream cleaner, no scouring pad, all of which will cut the plating and leave it permanently dulled; a dry microfibre cloth is enough, and a breath of moisture and a buff will handle a fingerprint. Do not repaint or strip the enamel — the chips are the object's history and a resprayed body is worth a fraction of an original one. If you do intend to use it, have the mechanism looked at first and feed it only the correct No. 13 staples; the wrong staple is what jams and bends these.