Frazz by Jef Mallett for November 05, 2019

The smell of fresh, moist mimeograph sheets was intoxicating to a grade-schooler.

And don’t forget the stencil machine. We actually had a home version of the mimeograph. It was a metal tray with a gel block in it.

“Well young-un, back in my day…”

Poor lady. Self-reflection is often worse than a mirror.

Ditto

I know the feeling. Hearing mimeograph immediately brought to mind some sort of examination of mimes, though.

Mrs. Olsen prefers to ignore what she sees in her mirror or feels in her bones. Good way to enjoy life during the age of adjustments. I’m with her.

She might have realized that she just opened herself up to a ton of questions, and having kids look at her like she was a museum piece.

Mimeographs (which printed in crisp black ink and had waxy stencils that could be generated on a typewriter) were actually quite a step up from ditto machines in terms of both number of copies and clarity of output, but they couldn’t match the ditto machine for multi-color capabilities.

I have cyclostyled papers till as recently (!) as 2005, with the stencils being printed on computer printers. And just a couple of years before that, I have even used typewriters to make stencils. Photocopying was still too expensive for us in the schools I worked in, in Bhutan.

The ditto machine was a copier that used alcohol to soften a little of the ink from a master copy and pressing it into a sheet of paper. The master was made by typing or drawing on a sheet with a disposable inked transfer page behind it, creating a reversed image. It was available in many colors, but the purple would make the most usable copies before fading. It was a relatively clean and simple low volume printing process. It was possible to store ditto masters for several print issues.Mimeo or stencil was a porous sheet with a wax or other coating on it. Typewriters had a leaver that would allow you to type without raising the ribbon so the letters would punch a porous spot. Ink would flow through an inked pad on a roller press ink onto the page. It would make many more copies than a spirit copier. Portions of the master would wear off and letters would become thicker and fuzzy with random black blobs coming through as it failed. Mimeo masters were an inked mess when done and usually discarded.Diazo was a chemical copying process. UV light was used to set or bleach away a chemical that was not being blocked by ink on the master. Ammonia vapor was used to convert the remaining coating to permanent blue ink. The photocopies in old tv shows were a quick photo negative that used a simplified process to develop the image.

I loved the fresh smell, it was an intoxicating buzz

You are not old until you used the hand-cranked mimeograph machine!

And what about carbon paper? Isn’t anyone going to wax nostalgic about carbon paper?

Was my school the only one that called them “dittos”?

smell great, purple fingers not

That’s actually pretty insightful

Wow. I had to look that one up on Google. I haven’t a clue if I ever saw an actual mimeograph. All I remember are those duplicates (etc.) using carbon paper.

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Of course, revealing your age and other awkward things about yourself can be turned into a modest living if you’re not especially suited to real work like teaching.

There is biological age and then chronological age. You can look and be younger than what your birth days you are. The opposite can happen too.

My mother had a home-mimeograph system: You typed or drew on a piece of paper with a (special) piece of carbon paper (who remembers carbon paper?) under it putting the thick carbon copy marks onto a template. That ink from the template was then transferred to a thin sheet of gelatin (or something similar) creating a mirror image from whence quite a few copies could be gotten by carefully placing typing paper on the image and then rubbing (maybe with a solvent? It’s been more than 60 years…). Once you had finished making the copies you wanted, you put the gelatin into a cookie tray and heated it gently in the oven for an hour or so, and (most of) the remainder of the mimeo-ink sank to the bottom, so the sheet could be used again. It was a serious pain in the sciatic area… I think that after a dozen or two instances, she found a way to pay for actual mimeographs at school.

And all the people confusing mimeograph copies with ditto copies are revealing that they aren’t as old as all that!

My dad repaired mimeographs and adding machines for a company called “Modern Business Machines.”