Given both the solemnity of Veterans Day and, more gloomily, our continuing life during wartime, the discovery of El Casco staplers recently sparked a welcome spot of cheer.
That 90-year-old Spanish concern at first manufactured revolvers, in the halcyon days when combatants killed one another with weaponry as simple and straightforward as revolvers.
Then, in a turn of events worthy of the Department of Cheap Ironies, the Great Depression compelled El Casco to diversify into desk accessories, using processes that the company’s website characterizes as “both painstaking and manual—all precision components are individually numbered and assembled by hand.”
That diversification succeeded quite admirably. One of El Casco’s staplers, in particular, would instantly elevate any home study from humdrum to hunky hauteur. To be sure, such devotion to craft scarcely comes cheap, especially considering that the company’s products feature chrome and gold plate. As a result, according to one online listing, its staplers range in price from $111 to $300—that’s a lot of Swinglines, folks.
Still, in context, only a desk accessory of the highest order could so handily and hearteningly recall Isaiah 2:4 regarding the nations of the world: “[T]hey shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks…”
To quote a cheap scrivener named Jake Barnes from a little novel published just six years after El Casco’s founding, in 1926, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
