Making Copies

Remember carbon paper? It came in four colors – blue, black, blue/black and red – at least those are the only colors I remember. I actually still have some stashed away in basic black. I saw it on sale someplace about ten years ago and decided to buy some before it became extinct. Of course, I am not sure what I thought I would do with it. As it turns out, I have found a few instances when I used it with a clipboard to make a handwritten receipt at the same time as the original purchase information. At that rate, I will be able to leave an almost full package for my grandchildren (Hmmh.. maybe I should tell them what is for. )

I remember typing with carbon paper. You could actually have 5 or 6 sheets of carbon paper if your copies were made on very thin onion-skin paper. But the copies on the top were darker than the ones on the bottom. So, the most “worthy” copied recipients got the darkest copies.

Of course, typing using carbon paper was not for anyone prone to typos. The process for making a correction was no fun. First, you would tear off as many small slips of paper as you had carbons. You would then go to the last carbon and erase the error with a special typing eraser with a little stiff brush on opposite end from the eraser (my favorite brand was a soft green color). You used the brush to get rid of the erasure fragments. Then you would move to the next sheet and insert a small piece of paper behind the carbon so the pressure you apply in making the erasure will not smear the page behind it. Once you have erased all of the copies and the original, you would hit the correct key and hope the erasure is not too noticeable.

In grammar school, high school and even college, we got dittos – sometimes still wreaking of intoxicating fluid and damp to the touch, but always purple. The teachers could handwrite or type them on a Ditto master. Forever, I will associate the smell of Ditto fluid with the dreaded “pop quiz.”

For larger copy jobs, there was the fancier duplicating machine which printed out in black very quickly. This type machine was used by my professors and my sorority alike. I mastered the art of typing stencils, provided I had an adequate supply of stencil correction fluid – another memorable smell. It was hard to get the long stencil positioned just right and the ink pad properly saturated.

By the time I was in graduate school in 1968, the campus bookstore had a copier. It was a wonderful machine that spared me from using carbon paper. For certain papers, I need to keep a copy. For others, I had to submit multiple copies. Life was good!

When I got my first job out grad school, it was as Assistant Librarian a small college in the mid-west. The library had a copy machine and I was in charge of it. It was a Xerox 914 copier, the workhorse of the day. It was a very large box that stood on the floor. As with any copier, it was prone to misfeeds. Whenever there was a misfeed, we had to remove the shiny black drum, handling it carefully to avoid scratching it. Only certain staff members were qualified to exercise the care necessary for this delicate task.

We moved to California is 1971, and I longed for the convenience of a home copier. I purchased a used thermal copier (Thermofax machine). It would make copies and it would also laminate and make overhead transparencies
By the late 1970s when I worked at an independent school, there was a collection of Diito machines, duplicating machines, a copier and a thermal copier – not to mention access to a printing company. And we still used carbon paper sometimes!
In 1980, I was working in a new, small independent school. Someone gave us a strange copier that required us to make an intermediary sheet before making a copy. I never really liked that machine. We bought a Ditto machine and managed for quite a few years with what was referred to as “fuzzy facsimiles.”

In the ‘80s, ‘90s and into the 2000s, the thing to do was to rent a big fancy copier. At the school and later when I started my own business, the big copier was our salvation. We had different copiers made by different companies, but all them misfeed prone. Repairs required waiting for the “copier guy” and sometimes meant ordering a part and waiting several days. Still, we were making copies. We said goodbye to carbon paper, Dittos and the duplicating machine.

But when I took my business virtual in 2006, I dumped the rental copier. For what I was paying each month, I could buy a small copier that is still, to this date, working OK. It has been repaired a couple of times, but is functional.
These days, we also have all-in-ones --- we have three of them in the house and they all make copies – albeit slowly – especially if in color. The fax machine also makes copies. So, counting the copier, we have at least five ways to make copies. But we don’t make so many copies these days.

Most everything we do is saved digitally and never printed – much less copied. On the other hand, there is still the need to send out larger quantities of things to be printed. Instead of making copies, usually I send the file to a printer who makes the copies and send them wherever they are to go. That spares me of the challenges of collating and stapling.
But there is still that range between 2 and 25 copies where the simplest thing is to do it on the copier. This is the job I hate the most. My little copier is smart enough to collate, but it won’t staple.

I guess the next step for me with be to find a fast, small volume copier that collates. It better not mis-feed, but I bet it will. They all seem to misfeed.