FROM THE MIMEOGRAPH TO THE PDF

The Mimeograph in action. Via the Civil Rights Movement Archive.

Sonia Sanchez taught a Black literature course in the English department. “At that time,” she said, “it was a revolutionary idea to insert into the English Department the study of African-American literature.” Many of the texts were out of print, so she often read aloud from her copy and reproduced excerpts, using mimeograph machines with messy ink. “My hands were always blue and purple,” Sanchez recalls “I thought they would never get clean again.” 

— Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), 47. 

C.L.R. James was the only person I knew in those days who had a copying machine in his apartment, and they were big in those days. That machine was crucial to his working methods then.

— Aldon Nielsen quoted in Jeremy Matthew Glick, The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 216. 

At Birmingham, where we had no resources, the very first day we arrived, they taught us all how to use the mimeograph machine, because they said "everything you write, everyone else is going to want to read, so you have to type it on a stencil and mimeograph it off." So every morning you got there, and in your pigeonhole would be these one- or two- or three-page manifestos that people had written. I remember someone read The History of Sexuality in French when it was first published, and immediately wrote up a four-page single-spaced precis of the book for those who didn't read French.

— Michael Denning, “The Cultural Commons: An Interview with Michael Denning,” Reconstruction 8:1 (2008).

 

In a world where books have long lost all likeness to books, the real book can no longer be one. If the invention of the printing press inaugurated the bourgeois era, the time is at hand for its repeal by the mimeograph, the only fitting, the unobtrusive means of dissemination. 

— Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), 51.

Predicament and Routes, after a period of existence as "books," have enjoyed a second life in the form of photocopies and PDF files. Some of this "publication" has occurred within the rules of copyright, some not. Knowledge transmitted this way cannot, nor should it, be legally contained. In any event, it has become all too clear that the academic book, as a physical object, does not travel very well. Disassembled and modular, the text gets around.

— James Clifford, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 10.