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Comment by tiku | Hacker News Reader

Please explain this trapper keeper. It looks like a re-usable enveloppe for school stuff?

Others have covered the physical aspects of the Trapper Keeper. But one thing not to be overlooked was there were the usual basic colors but also wild designs: Lisa Frank, Transformers, all sorts of ways to express individuality and identity which matters to kids who don't get many chances for that.

They were also more expensive than regular binders and the rings weren't lined up with regular folders, so being in the Trapper Keeper ecosystem was a class symbol in my school.

South Park explained everything you need to know about how cool the Trapper Keeper truly is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jSPNoA40jg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5czEGnl2Wo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapper_Keeper_(South_Park)

>... the Trapper Keeper binder is destined to gain sentience and hybridize into a supercomputer to conquer the world in the future, and wipe out all traces of humanity ...

The “Trapper” is a folder with vertical pockets for holding papers. The “Trapper Keeper” is a 3-ring binder for keeping your Trappers. The binder also closes with a button or velcro fastener.

It is a binder that holds folders-that-hold-paper instead of just bare paper.

The locking cover was like the belt and suspenders and served to show off the style of the owner.

Its a fancy binder for school stuff.

It's the brand name for the original 3-ring binder. The paper company Mead sold them along with 3-hole punched notebooks so that you could store and swap out multiple notebooks.

It was ultimately a way of selling more paper. It was hugely successful and is the reason 3-hole punches and 3-ring binders exist today.

According to Wikipedia, ring binders were invented in the late 1800s.

The Trapper Keeper came out after I graduated high school. But we had 3-ring binders before that - they were fabric covered (like a cheap denim) and had metal rings which made a loud snap when you closed them. They had good & bad aspects - you could draw on the fabric and customize your binder (something the Trapper Keeper couldn't do until they allowed an artwork insert years later). And bad: the metal rings would get bent and not meet up anymore so your papers would fall out.

So far as customization - the thing we'd do with textbooks is cover them in paper grocery bag material so you'd have something to draw on, as well as protect the book so you wouldn't be charged when you returned it.

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