Measured under laboratory conditions (a bathroom scale and considerable patience), the medium binder clip exerts approximately four and a half pounds of clamping force through two steel handles bent into a wire triangle, a design unchanged since its patent in 1910, which makes it older than the stapler beside it and considerably more reliable.
The handles are its most misunderstood feature. Office workers remove them constantly, believing the clip works better without them, and are wrong; the handles distribute pressure evenly across the jaw, and a handle-less clip left standing on a desk will, within a week, be repurposed as a phone stand, a cable organizer, or a small black beetle by anyone under the age of ten. This secondary career is not a flaw. It is the clip fulfilling a second, unlisted function the manufacturer never anticipated and the office never questioned.
Under load it holds one hundred and eighty sheets without slipping, more if the paper is fresh and the corners are square. It shows wear only at the fold, a hairline crack that appears around year three and rarely progresses further. Filed here as the most structurally honest object in the building: what it promises on the box, it delivers on the desk, and it never once pretends otherwise.