Frazz by Jef Mallett for March 04, 2014

Somewhere in the bowels of all the old schools are dusty mimeograph machines still on the inventory sheets, but no one can figure out what they are to get them off the inventory.

Mimeograph? Xerox? all we had in Yorkshire were slate tablets and a piece ‘o’ chalk we had t buy off teacher….

It’s said that odors make for strong memories. I still remember the sharp, pungent smell those mimeo sheets gave off.

Nice Colnago T-Shirt

You win the comments section.

I loved the smell of fresh Mimeograph in the morning

The Columbus OH Dispatch has announced that it is dropping Doonesbury, which has gone into perpetual reruns, and is picking up Frazz instead! Yay!

Y’know, “tablet” is also a term for a pad of paper (where do you think the computer industry stole the term?)… Mrs. Olsen just missed a chance to play with Caulfield’s brain…

Ahh, the smell of purple ink on the ditto papers,… I was notorious in class for sniffing the entire scents off my test sheets once they were handed to me. ;-)

Nice use of mimeograph purple for Mrs. Olsen’s sweater, Jef! I can’t be the only one who noticed that!

For those of us remembering the smells:Mimeograph was the black ink, put on the rough paper by a stencil wrapped around a drum, which contained the black ink. It had a very definite aroma. Many churches used them for Sunday morning bulletins, as well as schools.Ditto was the purple ink, on a smooth white paper. The teacher prepared a master on a special sheet, it was wrapped around a cylinder, and alcohol was used to transfer a little of the master’s purple image to each sheet, until the master wore out. That is what you were smelling on those purple quiz sheets the teacher gave out: alcohol.Once, in fourth grade, my teacher sent me to the office with a newly prepared Ditto master, and I got to watch as the secretary ran off the item on the machine. (As an adult, I spent almost 40 years in the printing industry.)

Ditto…

Good enough for Faber College

When I first started teaching the school had both a copying machine and a mimeograph. The copying machine always had a line and when it broke down or needed toner the other teachers were helpless. The mimeograph never broke down, and since I was the only one who knew how to use it, I never had to postpone my copying chores on prep day.

OT, from several days back, and on C&H:

The Rand links were merely informative, for someone who asked about who she was; I wasn’t making a position statement. For the record, I am pretty far left of center. You would probably recognize that, if you remembered me as the commenter on comics.com who posted as “Vance_Shaw” (I recall that you had approximately the same handle as you do now). I tired of butting heads with the implacable trolls and now merely comment when the mood strikes.

You’re all mixing up ditto and mimeograph. The fragrant purple worksheets were dittos. I don’t think my school could afford a mimeograph….

I remember my first-grade teacher in 1963-64 had a kind of ongoing feud with the mimeo/ditto (whichever was the purple/blue color) machine. She often came back to the class room with very stained fingers and hands and a frazzled expression and cranky voice. Sometimes she had the finished papers, sometimes not….

They should make reproduction hectographs for first-graders to play with. Those were really cool: each student got to pull his own copy.

I used to repair those things for AB Dick.

We used chisels and stone tablets. Walked to school uphill in 3 feet of snow both ways. In summer.