Brass Bookends and the New Canadian Currency
by Bill Schroeder
             
On the desk in my father's study, a sanctum his kids were not scared to enter though we dared not disturb so much as a single paper clip without his knowledge, he had a pair of sturdy brass bookends whose design featured  a three-masted clipper ship with all sails unfurled.  Serious looking folders and documents, whose import I could only dimly speculate, were held in place between these bookends.  I do not recall ever knowing where the bookends came from;  there did not seem to be any profound family story behind their purchase but they did accompany us through half a dozen moves during our childhoods and always ended up in a prime spot in his new study.  In hindsight, the nautical motif seems a bit unusual.  My father grew up in southern Manitoba, a little south and only a few of kilometres west of a sign on the Trans Canada Highway proclaiming the longitudinal centre of Canada - in other words, about as far from an ocean as is physically possible to be on this continent.

A couple of years after my father passed away, several of us siblings met in Manitoba to help clean out mother's condo ahead of her move to an assisted living facility.  Of course, this required some serious downsizing.  Big ticket items were divided up appropriately, there were numerous trips to the landfill and Value Village, and we held a draw to divvy up some of the knick-knacks and keepsakes that we couldn't bear send to a thrift store.  Among other items, I ended up with father's old bookends.

I will admit that not nearly all of things retrieved during that exercise have found uses to match the fond, nostalgic memories the three of us felt as we cleaned up the condo, and the bookends are a typical example.  They have sat on my desk for almost a year but have not been required to keep my documents in place and there is seldom enough of a draft in that room for their other obvious use as a paperweight.   But then a light bulb went off in my head and now I am glad I have them.

The last year or two has seen the rolling out of new Canadian currency and as each new denomination comes on stream there have been news reports of people expressing frustration with the new bills.  A much reported observation is that the bills melt when heated but I have never noticed that to be a real problem and this compliant strikes me as a contrived issue, similar to the reports when the toonie first came out of people bashing them with sledgehammers to see if the centre piece would dislodge.

A much more real annoyance, one that I am surprised has not received more press since it surely is being felt nationwide by small business operators and others who regularly handle bundles of currency, is the fact that the new bills do not stack properly.  My wife runs a school cafeteria and dealing with her daily cash receipts typically involves sorting a wad of several dozen bills of various denominations.  In the BNC (before new currency) period it was easy to place the 5's, 10's and 20's in their respective piles and count each stack when done.  If you encountered an especially crumpled or folded bill, you could simply make a quick lengthwise crease and add it to the stack where it remained in place till you finished the operation and started to count them up.

This does not work ANC (I'm sure you can figure out what that means).  Once one of the new bills has been folded, the crease endures.  The most common fold is the shorter one along the width of a bill which makes it easier  to fit into a wallet, purse, or pocket.  However bill-counters prefer lengthwise folds to facilitate stacking.  A collection of bills with varying folds will flop all over the desk top.  If you try to make a lengthwise fold on a bill that already has a crease along the width, the result will be neatly divided into quadrants, but it will not stay in place on top of a pile of bills, especially if the pile already has other bills with random bends and folds.  Perhaps an analogy would be a deck of playing cards - once one card has been noticeably bent it is forever "marked" and will subsequently impact dealing and shuffling.

A few weeks ago I  needed to catch up on several days of bill sorting and had a larger than usual collection of cash to count.  I was getting frustrated when the piles of 10's and the new 5's kept tumbling over and not staying where I put them.  Suddenly I noticed the old brass bookend out of the corner of my eye and grabbed it and put it on top of the pile.  It worked.  The pile stayed in place, even through a quick up-and-under manoeuvre when the next bill of that denomination needed to be added to the pile.  I now make sure these bookends are handy whenever I am doing this job.  I still prefer the older, less slippery, bills but at least I have found a way to deal with the stacking problem of the new ones.  Thanks Dad.