I come from a long line of printers. My grandfather set type; ink is in the family the way land or seafaring is in other families. So when, somewhere in my early teens, I became fascinated by photocopiers, nobody should have been surprised. Reproduction was the family business. I had simply moved to the modern department.

The method was systematic, because the whole point was the system. I telephoned the sales offices of every marque on the market — Canon, Xerox, Ricoh, Mita, Konica, Minolta, Sharp, and the rest of the field this issue surveys — and explained, with the gravity only a teenager can manage, that the brochures were needed for a school assignment. The sales departments, bless every one of them, obliged. At Canon there was a man named Ray Dixon who sent brochures and posters with such generosity that eventually his secretary intervened. This magazine considers Mr Dixon its founding patron.

The collection was filed in a briefcase-style filing case: alphabetical by marque, then ascending by copies-per-minute, which remains the only correct ordering and is the one used by the Big Matrix on page —. I pored over model numbers, copying methods, feeder types. I had opinions about the Reversing Document Feeder that I hold to this day. And I especially loved the finishers — the sorters and staplers and folders, the machines that turned a stack of paper into a finished thing. They get the special feature they always deserved on page —.

And then there was the red one. A special edition, found by luck, that reviewed and compared every photocopier of the day — the whole market between two covers. It went into thick protective plastic the day it arrived and was, by any honest accounting, my most treasured possession. Thirty years on, the research department has identified it: a photocopier special of What to Buy for Business, Australian edition. The masthead rang a bell the moment I saw it again. Some bells stay hung.

You know how this ends. After my final exams, in the great clearing-out of my school life, my mother convinced me it was time for the collection to go. I obliged. Briefcase, brochures, the red magazine in its plastic — all of it. She saw clutter; I saw infrastructure; the bin saw everything. I have regretted it without interruption since, and I say that with love, because she was doing what mothers do, and I was agreeing the way sons agree.

This issue is the reprint run. Eleven marques researched properly, every specification sourced or honestly marked unverified, the decade timed year by year, the finishers celebrated, the lounge-room floor annotated like the archaeological site it is. It is not the collection. Nothing will be the collection. But a print run of one, for an audience of one, in memory of a briefcase — my grandfather would have understood completely.

Reproduce reliably,

The Editor

Aged fifteen and three quarters; also, somehow, fifty.