Some days you find something that just *works* and have to share it. Plus, posting it here will help me to remember it for next time.
I had a bunch of PDF files for a manuscript I was preparing that I needed to merge together. File size was big and I refuse to pay for the privilege of doing it in Adobe Acrobat.
A quick Google uncovered PDFtk (PDF Tool Kit) by PDF Labs which has been around for a while.
PDFtk free provides a super simple windows GUI that merges PDFs without watermarks. Installation onto Windows 10 was simple and did not add search toolbar rubbish like some other “freeware” software attempts to do.
You can obviously get the Pro version for a small amount that provides other options during PDF creation, but for just merging PDFs this was good enough for me.
Check it out!
Link for download: https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/
