|
The mimeography process The stencil proper is made of waxed mulberry paper. This rather floppy waxed sheet is backed by tissue or carbon paper and a sheet of stiff card, the sheets being bound together at the top. This assemblage is placed in a typewriter to create the original. The typewriter ribbon action has to be disabled so that the bare, sharp type element strikes the stencil. The impact of the typewriter key displaces the wax, making the tissue paper permeable to the oil-based ink. This is called "cutting a stencil". If the typewriter keys are struck too hard, letters like "o" or "b" will be cut out, causing solid black blobs instead of white space in the center. If carbon paper is used behind the stencil, it will generate a proof copy on the card backing. Alternately, proof can be read by placing the stencil on a light table. A variety of specialized styli can be used on the stencil to render lettering or illustrations by hand against a toothy plastic backing card. On-stencil illustration is an art. Mistakes can be corrected by brushing them out with correction fluid and retyping once it has dried. (This substance was known as "corflu" in the United States and "obliterine" in Australia and the UK.) The stencil is wrapped around the drum of the (manual or electrical) machine, which is filled with ink. When a blank sheet of paper is drawn between the rotating drum and a pressure roller, ink is forced out through the marks on the stencil. True mimeo paper is softer and a bit shaggier than standard bond paper. The ink is most often black, although green, red, blue, brown, and purple inks are available. The purple ink tends to halo after printing. If one puts the stencil on the drum wrong-side-out, one's copies come out mirror-imaged. The process can be messy for inexperienced users. Another device called an electrostencil machine could make mimeo stencils from an already-printed original. It worked by scanning the original on a rotating drum with a moving optical head, and burning through the blank stencil with an electric spark in the places where the optical head detected ink. It was slow and filled the air with ozone and other pollutants, and text produced from electrostencils was of lower resolution than that produced by typed stencils, though the process was good for reproducing illustrations. A skilled mimeo operator using an electrostencil and a very coarse half-tone screen could make acceptable printed copies of a photograph. This took considerable care both in preparing the stencil and in maintaining evenness of the ink flow during printing. During the declining years of the mimeograph, some people made stencils with computers and dot-matrix impact printers. Gestetner, Risograph, and other companies still make and sell highly automated mimeograph-like machines externally similar to photocopiers, as the mimeo process is faster and less expensive than xerography for moderate to large print runs, although the image quality is inferior. The modern version of a mimeograph is called a digital duplicator or copyprinter and contains a scanner, a thermal head for stencil cutting, and a large roll of stencil material entirely inside the unit, making the stencils and mounting and unmounting them from the print drum automatically, making it almost as easy to operate as a photocopier. Risographs are the best known of these machines. Origins of the Mimeograph Thomas Edison received US patent 180,857 for "Autographic Printing" on August 8, 1876. The patent covered the electric pen, used for making the stencil, and the flatbed duplicating press. In 1880 Edison obtained a further patent, US 224,665: "Method of Preparing Autographic Stencils for Printing", which covered the making of stencils using a file plate, a grooved metal plate on which the stencil was placed which perforated the stencil when written on with a blunt metal stylus. Edison did not coin the word "mimeograph", which was first used by Albert Blake Dick when he licensed Edison's patents in 1887. Dick received a Trademark Registration for the term "Mimeograph", TM registered in US Patent Office as Others who worked concurrently on the development of stencil duplicating were Eugenio de Zaccato and David Gestetner, both in Britain. The term "Mimeograph" was originally protected as a trademark, however over time the term became generic and is now an example of a genericized trademark. "Roneograph" (also "Roneo machine") was another trademark used for mimeograph machines. Mimeographs were used extensively in the production of fanzines in the middle 20th century, before photocopiers became widespread. In sufficient quantities, however, they are still more economical. Certain typographical practices were peculiar to mimeographical publication, due to the tendency of the stencil to tear, thus becoming useless. Underlining was neither used in spaces nor on the letters with descenders. The expression of irony by crossing out letters was done with a forward slash, not a hyphen. This differs from the method in hypertext. Penelope Rosemont pioneered a surrealist technique of peeling the backing away from the stencil to create a "mimeogram". See also | ||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||
 |
|
| |