From TYWKIWDBI, a college exam, in beautiful ditto purple. Readers of a certain age will immediately flash back to classroom “handouts,” still warm and slightly damp in the early morning, an exotic aroma rising from the paper.
I have any number of purple syllabi and handouts in my notebooks from college, usually typed, sometimes handwritten, sometimes typed with handwritten corrections added. (It was a different time.) In my earliest teaching days, I got to run a spirit duplicator and make purple pages all by myself. Later, still as a grad student, I had a free pass to use a department Xerox machine to copy articles and chunks of books. (Why not?) As a professor, I found such stuff off limits: the department machines were for staff and student workers only.
I have spent too much time this morning trying to figure out how a page printed with a dot-matrix printer (an Apple ImageWriter II) turned into the purple handout in this post. Did I run a ditto master through the printer? How could it have made an impression? And if that’s not what I did, what did “they” — the people with access to the machines — do to create a purple page?
Thanks to Ian Bagger for pointing me to the exam and an excellent (new to me) blog.
A related post
A 1940 advertisement for the A.B. Dick Mimeograph duplicator
Wednesday, August 26, 2020
Purple prose
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comments: 4
I,too, have some of those old mimeo handouts. I remember having to create a mimeo handout which is a pain to do. Heaven forbid if you made a mistake and had to cross-out what you had typed!!
And when you got the hand-out/exam that was still warm and damp was always a good school day.
Kirsten
I remember sometimes using a razorblade to scrape purple from the back of the ditto page. (Perfectionism run amok.) And in high school, a history teacher who’d come in with quizzes on hot, damp pages sliced in half. “Charles Martel defeated the ____ at the Battle of ____ in ____.” Those three fill-in-the-blanks, again and again.
I was thrilled in 1982 when the department I worked for got an IBM Memory 75 typewriter, which was an upgrade on the Correcting Selectric we had before. Now I could put a page into memory and fix the errors before putting a ditto master in. No more correcting with the corner of a razor blade (at which I was a virtuoso, I must say)!
I've used a dot matrix Epson printer to cut mimeo stencils from, around 1983 or so. I worried that the wax might gum up the heads, but it didn't in the time I was using it. I didn't try ditto masters, because we'd moved to another state, so I wasn't in a department with a ditto machine, but we were in local fandom and owned a mimeo (which I still have).
I also have done a lot of artwork on ditto masters, some of it for the same foreign language department I was working in at the time of the first paragraph. I drew pages of vocabulary words with slightly amusing cartoons to help get the points over. I still have one of those, but I've scanned it in case it turns invisible. (My dittos from the 70s still seem fine--the ones that weren't pale to start with.)
Memory typewriters were strange machines. I had a Panasonic that could store (I think) several pages of text, with a tiny display (forty characters, I think). Scrolling through a document at that pace now seems unimaginable.
Your memories make me realize that I can’t recall seeing a single image on a ditto from my college life. It was nothing but words, always.
Thanks, Kip, for sharing your ditto and mimeo experiences here.
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