[John Valentine]

I am a person with vast experience in the so-called developing world. I have worked in the United States only four years out of my adult life.

I know the bureaucratic hapits and procedures for many countries and have observed how certain common features of office procedures were bequeathed by the Brits on their former colonies. They did NOT use staples. Staples were still rare and not used in Government offices until well into the 1990s to my personal knowledge, and I suspect still.

Please take my statement on this as determinative. I know what I am talking about, or I wouldn’t say it.

[Plutarch]

Nice pick up on the staple holes.

What we don't know is whether a forgery would be more or less likely to have staple holes than an authentic 45 year old BC.

Also, have staples always had the same width? Can we say anything about the era in which it was stapled from the staple width?

[BP2]

I know the bureaucratic hapits and procedures for many countries and have observed how certain common features of office procedures were bequeathed by the Brits on their former colonies. They did NOT use staples. Staples were still rare and not used in Government offices until well into the 1990s to my personal knowledge, and I suspect still.

I was rather surprised ... staples have been around a LONG time ... and became more common after WWII.

Antique Staplers & Other Paper Fasteners -- the History of Staplers

1870s ~ Individual Preformed Staples: The first desktop machine designed to fasten papers by inserting and clinching metallic staples was patented in 1877 (US. Patent No. 195,603). A number of the earliest machines held only one preformed wire staple at a time and had to be reloaded each time they were used. The photo to the right shows one such machine, a McGill Single-Stroke Staple Press No. 1, which was patented in 1879 and advertised during 1880-1909. To see several single-staple machines, click here.

OldStaplers.com reports that in 1868 and 1874, before the development of machines that both inserted and clinched staples, two patents were issued for machines that inserted, but that did not clinch, staples.

[bgill]

Just because Brits didn’t use staples in ‘64 doesn’t mean that sometime in the past 40+ years it wasn’t stapled to something.