Paper Clips

I came home from the Betsy-Tacy convention with many purchases, even though I am someone who almost never buys anything.  Packed into my luggage for my return home were:

1. Convention totebag
2. Convention T-shirt
3. Hardcover former-library edition of Betsy and the Great World
4. Hardcover former-library edition of Betsy Was a Junior
(I already owned both in paperback, of course, but craved a hardcover edition.)
5. Julie Schrader's  Discovering Deep Valley: A Guide to Maud Hart Lovelace's Mankato
6. Two books about the real life stories behind the book characters, by Amy Dolnick Rechner
7. Two packets of Betsy-Tacy note cards
8. Four little plates in the shape of knitted hats and mittens
(bought at the silent auction - I really didn't even want them and hated to have to lug them home, but somehow couldn't stop bidding on them, they so much represent the coziness of the winter scenes in all the books)
9. The most recent entry in the Mother-Daughter Book Club series by Heather Vogel Frederick, in which the girls are reading Betsy in Spite of Herself

That was all well and good.  But the purchase I most treasure?  I paid $15 to buy five paper clips from Maud Hart Lovelace's literary estate, paper clips used for her Betsy-Tacy manuscripts and research notes.  They came in a tiny plastic bag stapled onto a decorative slip of paper with the conference logo and the label "Maud's Paper Clips."  They are definitely old paper clips, even starting to be a bit rusty.

No clue was provided regarding the particular manuscript to which these paper clips were affixed.  I am going to believe that they came from Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown, my favorite book in the series.  I'm hoping that at least one of my paper clips held together my favorite chapter in this favorite of all books, the chapter where Betsy makes her first-ever visit to the new Carnegie Library.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with these paper clips. Maybe I'll clip one of them to a manuscript of my own, if I ever have a manuscript that seems worthy.  Maybe clipping it to one of  my manuscripts would inspire me to make it be more worthy.  For now, I'll just look at them, and rub them, and hug myself that I have in possession actual paper clips once touched by the author in the whole world whom I admire most.