The Acid-Free Finger

A professor once advised us that the middle finger expended the least pressure out of all five and was thus the digit of choice for holding down archival documents. Who was this woman, I wondered? Perhaps she was some sort of revisionist? “This nineteenth-century legislation banning women from saloons is fucked!” she’d say and then she’d simultaneously display the offending paper and flip history the bird. Or maybe she was some freak from the conservation unit, incapable of regulating the pressure emitted by her index finger and now forced to deliver her cautionary tale at the Walter Reuther Labor Archives.