Home Copiers

At risk of trivializing the idea of blessings, I write today about home copy machines.  My husband has a collection of antique cello music. He was contacted by a musician in Spain studying some Spanish composers whose work is represented in the collection. I just finished copying some fragile old music here in the comfort of my home, with the calm golden garden just outside. So much more pleasant than trekking to the copy center in the rain!

I am of an age to remember the odd, sweet smell of mimeograph copies - the blurry purple pages  of pop quizzes in school. Modern copy machines were a wonder, even the asthmatic one in my office, back when I was working as a hydrogeologist. This machine wheezed, rocking slightly back and forth; at intervals it sneezed, blowing a small cloud of black dust out the back. When my sons were in high school I helped out in the book room at school. Part of that job was operating an enormous high-capacity IBM copy machine. The amount of paper used defied description.

Indeed, I noticed when I was working that, as copy machines became omnipresent, we began to substitute making a copy of an article for actually reading it. Accumulating huge files of paper was equivalent to controlling a body of knowledge. The internet and gigabytes and terabytes have changed that. Now an unimaginably large amount of knowledge is out there (where is there?) and even books are threatening to become obsolete.

It hasn't been so long ago that we never imagined having a home printer/ scanner/ copy machine, much less using it for homely things such as to copy a recipe for a friend or to enlarge a drawing.