The Online Photocopier You Never Had

The toner is the tell. Hold a page from a 1991 photocopier to the light and you can read its haste: the grey fog across the white, the spot where the original lifted off the platen and left a black bruise at the margin, the staple driven through a folded stack at an angle no professional would accept. That ugliness was the point, or close to it. Somebody stood at a machine in a copy shop after the manager went home, fed it a master sheet assembled with scissors and a glue stick, and pressed the green button forty times. What came out was a magazine no publisher had approved, no distributor had ordered, no accountant had costed. The small print run begins there, in the hum and the heat and the smell of warm toner, and everything since has been an argument about who gets to press the button.

Before the Xerox 914 landed on office floors in 1959, multiplying a page meant a relationship with a process: letterpress, mimeograph, the spirit duplicator with its purple ghost. Each had a craft and a gatekeeper. The plain-paper copier dissolved the craft. You no longer needed a skin, a stencil, a plate, a chemistry set. You needed a coin and a flat original. Reproduction became something you did on a lunch break. The machine did not care whether you copied a tax form or a manifesto, and that indifference was the most radical thing about it.

The midnight economy of the copy shop

Zine culture grew in the gap the copier opened. Punk found it first, because punk needed speed and contempt for finish. Cut-up ransom-note typography was less an aesthetic choice than a description of the tools: typewriter, magazine, scissors, paste, a machine that flattened all of it into the same grey. Sniffin' Glue in London ran off in editions that looked made during a fire, which was roughly the intended effect. The look said: this took an afternoon, you could make one too, and we are not waiting for permission.

Riot Grrrl pushed the same machine somewhere else in the early nineties. Here the copier was infrastructure for a network the mainstream music press refused to carry. Bikini Kill, Jigsaw, hundreds of titles with print runs in the dozens, traded by mail, sold for a dollar or a stamp, written in the first person about things the newsstand would not print. The economics were the politics. A run of fifty cost almost nothing, reached exactly the people who wanted it, and answered to no one. The copy shop at midnight kept recurring as a location because that was when a clerk might look the other way, or the machine was free, or the only honest hour to write the thing had finally arrived.

What the photocopier democratized was not design. Most zines were, by any trained measure, badly set. It democratized the run — the act of making more than one. It collapsed the distance between writing a thing and having it exist in the world as an object another person could hold. The gatekeeper was not removed so much as bypassed, left guarding a door nobody used anymore.

Rebuilding the machine online

Then the door moved. Print-on-demand arrived in the 2000s and tried to reconstruct the copy shop as a web form. Lulu let you upload a manuscript and sell a perfect-bound paperback that did not physically exist until somebody bought one. Blurb did the same for the photo book, courting designers with better paper and a desktop tool. Newspaper Club, the most charming of them, printed actual newsprint in short runs, so a wedding, a research project, or a one-off joke could arrive as a broadsheet smelling faintly of the press.

The promise was continuous with the photocopier: no minimum order, no warehouse, no thousand unsold copies in a garage. The break was subtler. POD moved the machine out of the room. You no longer stood at it, fed it, smelled it, or jammed it. You uploaded a PDF and waited for a box. Something was gained — global reach, a real spine, ISBNs for those who wanted to play at being a publisher — and something specific was lost. The midnight clerk. The physical act. The accident of the platen. POD industrialized the small run and, in doing so, made it tidy. The fog cleared. The bruise at the margin healed.

It's Nice That, writing about a later project, would reach back for the older machine to explain the newer one, calling it "the online photocopier you never had." The phrase is exact because it is nostalgic. It admits that the thing built online is a reconstruction of a thing we used to touch, and that the reconstruction is missing the grain.

The file is the last gate

Here is the limit every print-on-demand service shares, and it is easy to miss because it sits so far upstream. They will print your file. They will not write it. The PDF is still yours to produce, which means the designer, the typesetter, the person who knows what a baseline grid is, never actually left the room. POD removed the printer and the distributor. It left the author and the designer exactly where they were. The button got easier to press; assembling the thing to be pressed did not.

Anonymous Press, originated by Karolis Kosas in 2013, is what happens when you notice that gate and walk through it. You type a subject and the system assembles a finished zine from the most "relevant" Google images, ready to print on demand in about twenty seconds. The catalogue already holds titles no committee would approve: Phallic Vegetables, Exploding Eyes, Inter-dimensional travel.

The move is to automate the last manual step. Not just printing your file — generating the file too. Kosas was blunt about what this does to authorship. "Having little control over the visual side of the publication," he wrote of his users, "they are forced to utilize language as their only design tool. The process thus moves into the realm of literature, where a narrator tells a story and leaves its visual representation to evolve independently in the imagination of his reader." The designer removes himself on purpose. "You actually don't need to be that original," he told an interviewer, "you just need to create these systems that allow people to generate the content for yourself." The images, as he said, "are not provided by me. They create the content for my platform and thus it becomes mine, but I don't do anything."

The user chooses the words. The algorithm curates the images. The reader interprets. Agency is split three ways, and no single party can claim to have made the book.

This is the photocopier carried to its conclusion. The 914 took your original and made it many. POD took your file and made it on demand. Anonymous Press takes your word and makes the original itself, then makes it many, then files it where the next person can reprint it forever. Each step automated one more human out of the loop. The punk at the copier still had to cut and paste. The Lulu author still had to set the type. The Anonymous Press user types a noun and steps back. People of Print called the concept genius, and the word is not too strong for an idea this clean.

What survives all of it is the paper. After every layer of automation, the project still insists on a physical object you can hold, staple, mail, lose, find again, reprint. The fog and the bruise are gone; the stubborn fact of the printed page is not. There is real affection in that, the affection of someone who watched the copy shop close and decided to rebuild its one good machine in software, then kept building until the machine could write the zine and not only copy it. The user supplies a word. The machine does the rest, and files the proof. Hand it back the keyword "design" and somewhere in the chronological library a book about you is already being typeset, by no one, forever. And they keep saying print is dead.