Like the pages of a tabloid-sized newspaper, the issues that readers raise about the smaller Guardian keep coming loose. This week more readers made contact, responding to my three recent columns that summarised your feedback since January.
A prominent theme throughout has been difficulties in keeping the pages together. The paper has “migratory tendencies”, said one reader, which it seems had not been experienced with broadsheet- and Berliner-sized Guardians of the past. However, the problem had been noticed when occasionally reading a different paper also tabloid-sized.
The Guardian’s production experts tell me that only one section can be stapled, and G2 is it. Journal can be pulled out whole from the middle of the paper.
Readers said they appreciate having sport as a separate section on Saturdays. One couple told me that their sport is watching the reactions of the small boys in the street and the delivery-van drivers at the traffic lights when the couple randomly hand them the sports section from the Saturday Guardian soon after the couple emerge from the shop where they purchase it.
Deadlines and production processes prevent the whole paper from being stapled, and in any event that would prevent the disassembly that aids simultaneous reading in households in the mornings.
John Hall, of Saltash, Cornwall, provided a potential answer for those who do like a stapled product. He wrote: “I was one such reader who found great difficulty in reading the main section because the pages kept slipping about.
“I don’t understand the physics that lead to this problem as opposed to reading the old size of paper. However I could understand the riposte about production times and, maybe, costs.
“Exasperated by the problem that interfered with my enjoyment of the paper I looked for a solution. I found it for the cost of a few pounds at Messrs Staples where I purchased a ‘long-arm stapler’. With this useful tool I can slide the paper, open at the centrefold, into the stapler so that a staple or two can be inserted into the centre of the paper in no more than a few seconds.
“The reading experience is transformed! I do not use the word lightly. From a tussle with recalcitrant pages I have an easy-to-handle newspaper such as the New Review section in the Observer, which is a model of production.
“You might care to make this solution known. I write as a reader for well over 60 years and laud the Guardian as the finest newspaper in the land.”
In chatting by phone with Mr Hall, I learned that the long-arm stapler is about 38 cm (15in) and “quite transformative”.
• Paul Chadwick is the Guardian’s readers’ editor
