Thursday, February 4, 2016

Filex


[“And the Style of Tip”?]

In 2014, while beginning to empty my office bit by bit of its, or my, accumulations, I rediscovered a file folder full of good stuff. The folder itself was a rediscovery as well. I have a dozen or so of these Filex Visible Name Folders, which I vaguely remember picking up in graduate-student days from a bookcase where faculty left odds and ends from their offices. (Think immersion heaters , sickly plants .) Each of my folders has “an all celluloid tab with face set at an angle of 45°, making names and index easily visible.” The tab, attached with four eyelets, can easily tear skin. This folder is not playing.

I thought that the Internets would make it easy to learn about Filex Visible Name Folders and Rand-Globe style. But no. Rand is an important name in the history of office equipment, as is Globe. But Filex? Nothing. Rand-Globe? I have no idea. But the Visible Name name makes me think that this folder must be a Rand product.


[From The Blue Book of Chicago Commerce (1922).]


[From Buffalo Live Wire (January 1916). Click for a larger view.]

Here is a page with photographs of employees assembling file folders in North Tonawanda. Do my folders date from the 1940s? I have no idea. But they’ve already outlasted countless cheap, disposable folders of my acquaintance.

From the folder full of stuff
Aglio e olio : The Art Ensemble of Chicago in Boston : Coppola/“Godfather” sauce : Jim Doyle on education : Mary Backstayge marigold seeds : A Meeting with Ludwig Wittgenstein : Seventeen ideas about interpretation : Tile-pilfering questionnaire

comments: 4

Slywy said...

Fun fact: I grew up near North Tonawanda. One of our many great Indian names from the Niagara Frontier.

Frex said...

Frex = Fresca
I just went to see "Asphalt Jungle" tonight (first in a Film Noir series!).
The police commissioner slaps a file folder, fat with wrongdoers, on his desk at one point, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was this brand!

Michael Leddy said...

That’s one of my favorite films (even officially, in my Blogger Proflie). I’ll have to watch it again.

Michael Leddy said...

For clarity: the exclamation point above means something like “It’s a small, small world.”