Perforation Perfection

A deep dive on a 1958 catalog from a very niche-specific company.

I like vintage catalogs. I also like design, functional and linguistic specificity, geometric patterns, and learning about how things are made. This 1958 catalog of perforated materials from the Harrington & King Perforating Co., Inc., which I recently found on eBay for $16, checks all of those boxes. It’s one of the coolest catalogs I’ve come across in a long time.

Part of the catalog’s appeal, at least for me, lies in the very specific notion of perforation. It would be one thing to encounter a company called the Acme Stamping Co., or the United Punch-Cut Co., or the Amalgamated Tool & Die Co. But when I think of something being perforated, I usually imagine either paper towels or an ulcer. It wouldn’t have occurred to me until now that the term might also apply to an entire mass-production niche. (I realize this may say more about me than it says about perforation.)

If you too never thought about a company dedicated exclusively to the act of industrial perforation, the H&K catalog will be a revelation. Or, rather, it will be a series of revelations, beginning with the front cover, which is, of course, perforated:

Those perforations on the catalog cover are round holes arranged in straight rows. But that’s just the tip of the perforation iceberg. Here are some of the other shapes and configurations H&K offered:

And what sorts of materials could these perforations patterns be applied to? Glad you asked:

Note the extremely pleasing section tabs running down the right side of the catalog.

I had to look up several of those materials, including Everdur, Herculoy, Inconel, molybdenum, Monel, Muntz, and terne plate.

And what can those perforated materials be used for? Here are some examples (you can see a bunch more here):

After all of those preliminaries, we finally get to the actual listings of the various perforation shapes and sizes that H&K offers.