Post- Digital Print - Monoskop

Autographic printing, a
mimeograph precursor
invented by Thomas
Alva Edison, 1876
Kurt Schwitters’ Merz magazine (see also chapter 4.4). Here Lissitzky
speculated on different levels about the new characteristics of what he
defined as “the book space”, which would definitively break with previous
conventions – and he ends with a climactic definition in capital
letters: “THE ELECTRO-LIBRARY”, championing a future vision of
books more ‘optical’ and sensorial than physical, and combining this
vision with the core technology of the time: electricity.
2.3 the mimeograph or stencil duplicator,
enabling underground publishing.
So even the exhilarating spirit of the early avant-garde could not do
away with traditional printing. The avant-garde struggled with the established
technology of printing, and it did so with an admirably innovative
approach. But the following decades would see the appearance
of new technologies and devices which were to change forever the very
concept of print.
One of the most important of these devices is undeniably the stencil
duplicator, also known as the mimeograph machine or ‘mimeo’.
Thomas Alva Edison patented a device for ‘autographic printing’ in
1876, the first step of a process that led in 1887 to the production and
marketing of the mimeograph. After a slow start, this revolutionary
technology was appropriated in the 1930s by left-wing radical groups
(not without some ideological controversy, as this effectively meant
replacing unionised print workers with a cheap, lightweight machine).
Significantly, the radical trade unionists of the Industrial Workers
of the World (IWW) embraced the mimeo stencil, declaring it to be
the IWW’s unionised printing facility. So even more than artists, it
was political activists and dissidents (such as the exiled Trotsky, who
printed his political ‘zine’ Byulleten Oppositzii in this way) who found in
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