Do you remember who invented the stapler and were it was first manufactured?

Do you remember what a stapler is?

Daniel Archer Melville, great grandson of Thomas Arnold Briggs, has written about the Bostitch legacy and his crazy Jamaican family, with ties in Warwick and East Greenwich, in “Lost Stitches,” a new book published by Ian Randle Publishers.

The Briggs family settled in Rode Island in 1780, with Thomas Briggs, the inventor, industrialist and multi-millionaire founder of Bostich, inventing a machine that stitched books from a coil of wire in 1896.

By 1900, the company had moved to East Greenwich – where the original name, the Boston Wire Stitcher Company, was shortened to Bostitch – and began manufacturing a product that would become a household name around the world. (I had a Bostitch stapler on my desk for many years.)

Great grandson Melville was fascinated with his great grandfather Briggs and began a long journey of discovering his heritage.

Melville’s tale is one of white privilege in Jamaica, where the color of your skin determined your status.

He digs deeply into the history of the family business that extended from Jamaica to Europe and all the way to Rhode Island.

There are fascinating takes of “crazy” family members who were quite eccentric in their ways. One particular story concerns the famous parrot-head himself, Jimmy Buffett.

Bostich was sold to Textron in 1966, but its legacy, enhanced by “Lost Stitches,” will live on.

For more information, visit www.ianrandlepublishers.com.