Max HD-10 Stapler

The HD-10 is a pocket stapler: a narrow channel of chromed steel about nine centimetres long, hinged at the back, with a coloured plastic cap over the head where the thumb presses and a matching tip on the end of the base. It holds a strip of fifty small No. 10 staples, loaded by sliding the base open, and drives them through about twenty sheets of paper. It weighs 63 grams and fits in a pencil case.

Its maker, Max, began in 1942 as an aircraft-parts firm and turned to office equipment after the war. In 1952 it made what it calls the first handheld stapler produced in Japan, the SYC-10, priced at less than half the cost of the heavy desk staplers then shared in offices, so that each worker could have one. In Japan the name of the company soon stood for the object, and customers would ask stationers simply for 'a Max'.

The HD-10, Max's standard handheld model, followed in 1973. Its body was a plain bright channel stamped with the model number, its cap and base tip in red, green, gold or purple plastic. Old stock in its green Max boxes still turns up unused, and it shows the same object that is sold today: Max has added a second cap at the back and changed the colours, but kept the size, the staple and the action.

The HD-10 now sits at the bottom of a long Max range of No. 10 staplers, beneath models with plastic covers, flat-clinching mechanisms and reduced-effort levers. Max still calls it a basic stapler used around the world. By 2018 the firm had sold more than 500 million handheld staplers, and the HD-10 remains the simplest of them: a strip of steel, a spring and a coloured cap, doing one thing.