Staple City

Can you imagine a city of staples?  Not a city of Staples, the big box store (that would be frightening and expensive), but a city made entirely of staples, the kind that go in a stapler.  Well I assume like most every other human being you have already notice the image right below this paragraph, but some of you may have not.  Anyway, checkout the photo below of a city made out of staples.

City of Staples

The linked page states it is an art installation from 2010 and that it was made from exactly 100,000 staples and took 40 hours to setup.  I have no clue where it was setup or how long it was actually ran as an installation.  This is the Internet, not an actual encyclopedia.  The important thing is that it was made from 100,000 staples.  That is one hundred thousand staples and forty hours if you are adverse to reading numbers.

I was initially impressed by these numbers until I realized that 40 hours is only a standard work week.  5 regular 8 hour days isn't much for creating a true and lasting piece of art.  100,000 staples sounded really cool until I remembered that staples come in boxes of 5,000.  I've got more than 20,000 staples just sitting in my desk drawer right now.  Since you can buy 5,000 staples for $0.60 getting 100,000 isn't even very expensive.  That's only $12.  Twelve dollars isn't even enough cash to buy food for a couple healthy Americans at McDonald's.

Cheap Staples

Each of these staples has a sheet capacity of 20 so one box is capable of holding 100,000 sheets of paper together in 5,000 different groups.  Now that's a number.  If you have 20 boxes of these staples, that means 2,000,000 sheets of paper.  That is 2 million.

Commercial Grade Staplers

As I was doing my usual jaunt across the internet looking for the new, the exciting, and the hottest trends in office supplies I found a new blurb about how the great state of Washington has been over paying for office supplies for the last four and a half years with their contract with Office Depot.  The state's General Administration says that they haven't been over paying and blurb from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reads:

"What they're saying is a (commercial-grade) stapler ... should get the same discount as a (regular) stapler," said GA spokesman Steve Valandra.

Now, I know a thing or two about staplers and I have seen my fair share of them come through my office and the desks around me.  Now I have spent some time in government offices and sat in front of and behind a government desk or two and I know the paper work they see isn't that much different than the paper the rest of us in the business world see.  You get a stack of papers that are related and you want to attach them together, so you staple them, no big deal.  Now for the sake of argument, lets throw out the cheap kiddie staplers with iMac colors and the big poppa industrial electric staplers and focus on a narrow subset of staplers, hand operated professional-looking desk staplers.

Standard Plastic Economy Stapler

For around $3 you can get yourself a fairly standard looking economical stapler with no frills.  It is made with high-impact plastic, but it is still mostly plastic.  Add another buck and you can get yourself an all metal Swingline stapler if that's a little more your style.  There is a good collection of staplers in various shapes and sizes as you get even more expensive that go by names like "Executive Staplers" and "Contemporary Staplers." A good quality commercial desk stapler will cost you around $8, but if you buy in bulk you can get them for even cheaper, and I would hope that the whole state of Washington would buy staplers in quantity equal to or greater than 24. Office Depot sells that stapler for... well you can see what they sell it for, and if the reviews on Amazon are to believed, there isn't any reason anybody would want or need any other more expensive stapler.

The Only Stapler You'll Ever Need

So yes, while we, the general public, do understand that there is a difference between the cheap plastic stapler you buy for your kids to staple together their riveting 13 page dissertation on the Kittens Inspired By Kittens video for their 3rd grade teacher and a nice all metal commercial desk stapler, there is also a large difference between what you pay for that same stapler at a place like Office Depot or Staples and what you might pay for it at a Discount Office Supply website.

Office Supplies as Art (Staples)

Every so often we come across somebody else who finds somebody else that links them to some great artwork created using office supplies.  While it is very common to make great pieces of artwork using pencils, pens, or markers it takes a certain different kind of creative spark to create artwork using a wholly different medium.   In the case of these two artists they have chosen to create fairly common pieces of art, but made them interesting by choosing a large scale and an odd medium.

Today we have a piece from the French artist Baptiste Debombourg called Aggravure with two individual parts "Air Force One" and "Air Force Two".  As near as I can tell Aggravure is a completely made-up word by combining the French word for staples (agrafes) with the French word for engraving (gravure) and essentially creating a word that means staple-engraving.  You can visit the link above to view the artists page and read their take on the piece, but be warned that the English isn't great.  To me it is the classical artistic take on contrast by creating flowing, flying images of humans (a very organic subject with a lot of movement) by tacking staples to a wall (a harsh metallic, immovable medium).

The artist claims that 35,000 staples were used in the creation of these pieces, and we have no reason to doubt them.  A standard box of staples has 5,000 staples so you wouldn't even need to buy them in bulk, and at the end of the day, it is probably even cheaper than the cost to paint them.  If you wanted to really one up the Aggravure piece and create your own Staple encrusted Sistine Chapel you can save money buy buying in bulk.  If you buy 200 or more boxes of staples you can get a bulk discount and really show everybody that you not only know how to create massive art, but you know how to save money.

Buy Staples in Bulk

Assuming that you do want to purchase 200 Boxes of staples and get the bulk discount, that's 3,500 staples in each box so you'll have 700,000 staples.  So if you use all those staples you will be guaranteed that your unique foray into the world of art will automatically be 20 times better than the Aggravure.