Or maybe they were more useful in an age before air conditioning and central heating, when you might expect more indoor air circulation that could blow your papers around?

Stretching a bit, but maybe from a time before there were glass windows (or before they were cheap enough to be readily available)?

Guess not. Wikipedia says they were produced first in the mid-19th century. Something pretty to put on your desk, I guess!

I expect that the paperweight originated as one of those marginally useless thotchkes that found itself a marketing niche. They probably made great gifts from the get-go, the fancier the better. Can anyone say "status symbol"?

I'm guessing you've never tried to flip through a stack of papers outside or in a room with a fan.

My educated guess is that, along with the desk "spike", they were a necessity before common use of cheap staplers. If you were reading or writing a multi-page document, prior to the early 20th century, there wasn't a cheap convenient way to keep pages organized, other than pinning them together (usable staplers really came in in the 19-teens/20's, according to the history of the stapler on, (who else's?) Swingline's site.) So if you had loose pages sitting on your desk or table, and someone walked by quickly, or ,god forbid, opened a window, there went your collation!

pre-empted by RGS. *hattip*

Sometimes in spring, summer, and fall, I leave the windows open at home--and I use paperweights to keep the papers from flying around. Even today!

These days a useless object is known as a "boat anchor", as in, "All Chevy small blocks are boat anchors". This can lead to fistfights with humor-impaired Chevrolet owners, so beware.

You say that "[t]he joke works in part because no one really uses paperweights these days."

I'm not that old, but I remember the saying back when people used paperweights. The basis for the "joke" isn't that people don't use paper weights anymore. It's because virtually anything can be used as a paperweight. If something was useful but later broke, it became a paperweight. If it was a Christmas present that you didn't want, you had a paperweight. In patent law, if you invented something and need to specify a utility to satisfy 35 USC 101, your invention could be a paperweight. ;-)

An interesting aspect of your post is, now that we don't use paperweights, I wonder if the saying will stick around.

Orin, next you should do a post on one of the most useful items for anyone who reads, or works with texts or books: a book weight. They make great gifts and once a reader gets one they don't know how they managed without one.

Another use for paperweights is to get large pieces of paper, such as maps or blue prints, to lie flat after being folded or rolled up.

Ahh, Saturday night at the VC. How did our lives all lead to this right here tonight?

I use a bread box.

I've found paperweights useful from time to time, too, often for holding open large rolled-up documents that would otherwise curl closed again as soon as one edge were released (e.g., maps). Of course, as joe noted, just about anything can be used as a paperweight, including mid-sized paperback books (which are, in essence, just stacks of paper held together by somewhat thicker paper).

Thanks Slim -- I was about to ask Glenn just how big his is. (I'm not that old, but I listened to my parents and my grandparents.)

I actually own a breadbox -- I took it from my mother, asking her a great many times how big it was -- planning to use it to hold bread, but it ended up taking up too much room on the counter. It's a nice enameled metal thing.

We've got a few paperweights -- my father's favorite is blown glass, and we've got some ceramic things. Like others said, useful when the window is open or a fan is blowing. I still open windows, but I have fewer papers. Or maybe not, but the papers I have are secondary to the computer.

I did have a master cylinder for a while that I was using to hold a door open.

Desk blotters anyone? Addiators?

But there is still no better mechanical pencil than the 0.046 inch (1.1 mm), especiall the Norma 4-color. (My father is fond of his stapler that cuts staples from a spool of wire, but that's too old-school for me.)

I have used paperweights regularly in a modern office building with windows that open and non hurricane airconditioning.

I place them on top of stacks of paper relating to different subjects so that the stacks do not get shuffled together and so that nothing is added to a stack without my placing it there. One paperweight per stack.

Back before the days of air conditioning all office buildings had open windows during the summer. A paperweight was as indispensible as a stapler back then. Air conditioning made it so that windows are not opened in offices very often (especially in high rise office skyscrapers where it's not even an option), so paperweights had absolutely no use.

Don't forget the traditional use of heavy paperweights to dent people's skulls in detective novels. It's getting hard to find a poker when you need one.

Surely there are parts of the US where fans were &still are, used regularly? Ceiling, floor, table fans? Impossible (in these circs) to work with papers but without paperweights.

Syd,

Fear not. With all the junk mail clogging our mailboxes the trusty letter opener is always at hand.

Speaking of staplers, the company I work for was still using teh wire spool staplers into the 1960s. I believe they used a spool of copper wire.

We stil have old documents that were stapled by one of those staplers.

Before I retired the Middle East and South Asia were part of my territory. Our Karachi office had no airconditioning, a staff of 50, a dozen ceiling fans and every desk had one or more paperweights, all identical. I ask our manager if they had an extra one. It graces my desk today.

Many commenters correctly point out that weights are still needed to hold down paper at some times. While this observation is no doubt correct my sense is that paperweight usage has dropped much farther than the need to hold down paper. In fact if we didn't have a paperweight tradition that encouraged buying them as gifts or souvenirs I'm skeptical they would be sold at all.

If I had to guess I would chalk up the decline in the use of paperweights to the following two factors in addition to those already cited.

1) An increase in the number of desktop/household 'cruft' such as staplers, lamps, ashtrays, pictures, letter boxes, cheap spare books, clocks, etc.. I suspect before the heyday of mass produced consumer goods there just weren't as many handy objects to hold your paper down with.

2) Threshold demand for paperweights. You don't need dedicated paperweights until the number of documents needing to be held down drops below the number of convenient cruft you have to hold it down. Since the advent of the computer, cheap stapling, central air, decreased use of (large) parchments that role up and all the other reasons cited above we've pushed down the need for paperweights down far enough that it can usually be handled by miscellaneous objects.

Not only was indoor weather more turbulent back in the day, people had far fewer storage options. Wealthy people and executives could afford the money and space for rolltop desks, but most made do with stacks of paper and stacked stacks, at that. Also, the interior turbulence wasn't all caused by the weather outside. Work spaces and homes were far, far more crowded, with co-workers and/or children bumping into one's table or whooshing by in a hurry. Think Dickens.

Being that unsung form of engineer, a seamstress, I find paperweights handy to hold pattern sheets down on fabric for cutting. They don't poke holes in the pattern, don't distort the fabric, and don't jump under expensively sharpened shears at unexpected times.

In our wired household, the American Heritage Dictionary is a paperweight.

Does anyone else remember making paperweights in Arts and Crats at camp? In our 150+ year old building on campus, we find the bits of slate that fall from the roof to be very handy as paperweights. If you ever read reproductions of documents that have been printed from old microfilm, a magnifying glass in the shape of the traditional paperweight can come in very handy as well.

At my firm, each secretary is assigned to four lawyers and on the ledge above his/her desk is a paperweight for each (with the respective lawyer's name on it), under which other lawyers can leave documents if that lawyer's door is shut or s/he is on the phone. I really like my paperweight.

I'm an appellate lawyer, and I spend a lot of my time reviewing documents that have been fastened together in file folders. These documents tend to flip closed when I put them down unless I put something on them to hold my place. The same is true of bound transcripts of depositions and trials.

I have a paperweight or two on my desk, but I usually just use whatever bulky object is at hand (usually a book or a notepad) instead of searching for them.

For all the other geeks drooling over the thought of a wire-spool stapler. (I can't be the only one!)

I worked with some documents from the 1920s recently and the multi-page documents were all held together by a straight pin in the corner instead of a staple.

I am using paperweights RIGHT NOW! Well...I was using them when I left work last night. I have large files that are bound together with clips at the top. I don't dare disassemble them, so if I want them to stay open to a certain page, I use a PAPERWEIGHT.

My preferred paperweight is a concrete plug cut by building maintenance when they were drilling holes in the floor to run wiring. Of course, I always have this fear that someday they will cut one plug too many and the Rhodes Office Tower in downtown Columbus, Ohio will come crumbling down.

it's how I organize papers dealing with different matters--one pile (one hopes only one) per matter. I don't want these piles getting mixed up somehow.

Same here. I have six paperweights in use this way right now. They are decorative, but they also serve a purpose -- making sure that each pile remains intact and in place.

BTW, for holding open transcripts and bound files, I highly recommend Levenger book weights.