Our prized 1943 edition of the Funk & Wagnalls New Standard Dictionary of the English Language—a book about the size and weight of a car battery—does not contain the term ‘photocopier’. The almost as cumbersome World Book Dictionary of 1973, however, provides definitions of both photocopier and ‘Xerox’, the corporation that in the intervening three decades developed the first office copying machines. Also included is a virtual advertisement masquerading as an example of usage: Microfilm takes weeks and is costly. Positive photostat takes time. What about Xerox? It is easy to imagine an 18-year-old today being totally flummoxed by that advice.

My first encounter with a photocopier came at exactly that age. It was 1985 and I’d just secured a clerical position that would take me all of nine months to tire of. But one good thing about the job was that sometimes in that tiny office, which was actually a converted weatherboard house, early in the morning before my comrades in government servitude arrived, I would photocopy something of interest: a few pages out of a library book, perhaps, or a story from a borrowed magazine.