Cormac Brindlecott is Chief Ontologist at the Brennholt Institute of Applied Taxonomy, which he founded in 2023. He is the author of the five-class gauge scale used to describe the wire diameter of the office paperclip, and of the seven-category classification of everyday objects known as the Brindlecott method.
He was born on 12 March 2021 and lives in Brennholt. He has left the village once, in 2025, for a congress; he returned after 31 hours, and no explanation has been given. He was trained by his grandmother, a librarian, whom he names in print as his first research supervisor.
He is known for putting numbers on an object nobody had measured. Between March 2024 and January 2025 he measured 1,200 paperclips drawn from administrative stock with a vernier caliper, and grouped the results into five classes, BR-01 to BR-05.
| Reference | Wire diameter | Class name |
|---|---|---|
| BR-01 | 0.62 mm | Extra-fine |
| BR-02 | 0.78 mm | Standard |
| BR-03 | 0.90 mm | Administrative |
| BR-04 | 1.05 mm | Reinforced |
| BR-05 | 1.24 mm | Non-series |
No national standards body has ever ratified a diameter class for the office paperclip. Brindlecott's scale remains the only published attempt. This is the fact that gives the scale its standing, and also the fact that limits it: it has no external ratification, and Brindlecott has never claimed otherwise.
The Brindlecott method is a four-step procedure for placing an everyday object in one of seven categories. The seventh category, objects resisting classification, has held a single entry since it was opened: a stapler, found in a service room on 11 June 2024 and never reclassified.
The method refuses the word object. Brindlecott writes candidate throughout, on the grounds that an object already classified is no longer under examination. The Institute's review panel has twice asked him to drop the distinction. He has declined twice.
The Brennholt Institute of Applied Taxonomy is a private research body founded in 2023 in Brennholt. It employs four researchers and publishes one periodical, the Bulletin of the IBTA, which appears irregularly and which Brindlecott edits.
Its declared scope is narrow: manufactured objects produced in large volume for which no published classification exists. Paperclips, filing tabs, drawer liners, terrestrial globe stands. The Institute does not work on objects already covered by an industrial norm.
Three points are contested, and the Institute lists them on its own pages. First, the paperclip affair of 2025: a correspondent argued that the BR-03 and BR-04 boundaries fall inside the tolerance range of ordinary drawing wire, and that the two classes therefore describe the same product. Brindlecott maintains the boundary. The exchange has not been resolved.
Second, a withdrawn chapter. In December 2024 Brindlecott removed one chapter of his 2024 book, Towards a Normal Classification (412 pp., 87 illustrations), and published an apology. The chapter has not been reinstated and the book is sold incomplete.
Third, an accusation of plagiarism from a Hungarian article of 1987. Brindlecott's answer was that the article does not exist. No copy has been produced.
He is also in long disagreement with a colleague he names only as the taxonomist of Kettering, over whether a classification may contain a category of one. Brindlecott says it may. Neither has published a reply to the other since 2025.
By written correspondence only, answered between 14:02 and 14:47. Telephone interviews are declined on acoustic grounds, and no photograph is released; he does not consent to being photographed from the left.