You’ve put the final touches on your first collection of poetry and determined you will form your work into a modest chapbook to distribute at the next slam. You figured out how to layout the pages, dividing each in half with a poem or two on each side. Maybe you even printed out the pages on fancy, marbled paper—enough pages for 20 booklets! You deduced how to lay the pages on top of each other, folded in the middle, to make a booklet. Now, all you must do is staple the booklet together in the middle. You reach for your handy home office stapler and realize, to your horror, that you can’t staple your chapbook in the middle without marring, wrinkling and bending your lovely pages. There must be a way to reach the center with a stapler—don’t these come longer? Why, yes, actually, they do! Aspiring poets, do-it-yourself marketers, and children making booklets about what they did on their (very long) summer vacation may ask, “What is a long reach stapler?” We have the answer.
A long reach stapler is exactly what it sounds like: a stapler that can reach farther into the center of a page. Most often used for “saddle-stitched” booklets, long reach staplers come in versions for hobby, home, and professional print shop use. Unlike an inverted “V” shaped booklet stapler that print shops use to run hundreds of booklets, a long reach stapler can sit flat on a worktable to manually staple oversized pages in the middle to form a booklet. The “throat” of the stapler, which is the part the paper goes into between the top and bottom of the stapler, is much longer than the ordinary office stapler. Long reach staplers have a maximum length but are adjustable up to that maximum to fasten paper of differing widths.
Now that you know what a long reach stapler is, you can find the correct tool to create your booklet, chapbook, church bulletin, or program for a future community theater production.