Found in my great grandmas box of recipes. Anyone with historical knowledge able to tell me more about this? Did they mail these to everyone or was this by subscription?
by MastodonTechnical724
2 Comments
stromm
When I see purplish ink print like that, the first thing that I think of is a mimeograph. It was a hand cranked drum style “copier” popular before Xerox machines. Lots of us who were in school between 1950 and 1990 used them to help teachers duplicate assignment handouts.
So I suspect this is a mass produced print mailed out or even just typed up locally and mass copied.
Also, the note about who doesn’t really mean it was sent out by them. I have lots of recipes with similar wording my elders used to help keep track who told them the recipe.
adrianmonk
Just from the way it looks, you can tell that this was not professionally printed. It would be a small number of copies (in the hundreds at most, probably) that were printed. I think that probably rules out mass mailing or subscription. It’s more likely to be some group (a church, a school, etc.) that shared recipes.
What I mean by the printing is two things.
One, you can tell it was typed because some of the letters are not in quite the right position on the page. This is especially evident with the capital D but also the B and C. They’re all just a little too high above the baseline. This is the kind of quirk you’d see on an individual typewriter.
Two, that purple ink is a dead giveaway that it was printed on a [spirit duplicator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_duplicator), also sometimes called a mimeograph or a ditto machine. This is the kind of machine an office would have and use to make their own copies, before a copy machine. It’s not something that a publisher or print shop would use. It’s DIY.
2 Comments
When I see purplish ink print like that, the first thing that I think of is a mimeograph. It was a hand cranked drum style “copier” popular before Xerox machines. Lots of us who were in school between 1950 and 1990 used them to help teachers duplicate assignment handouts.
So I suspect this is a mass produced print mailed out or even just typed up locally and mass copied.
Also, the note about who doesn’t really mean it was sent out by them. I have lots of recipes with similar wording my elders used to help keep track who told them the recipe.
Just from the way it looks, you can tell that this was not professionally printed. It would be a small number of copies (in the hundreds at most, probably) that were printed. I think that probably rules out mass mailing or subscription. It’s more likely to be some group (a church, a school, etc.) that shared recipes.
What I mean by the printing is two things.
One, you can tell it was typed because some of the letters are not in quite the right position on the page. This is especially evident with the capital D but also the B and C. They’re all just a little too high above the baseline. This is the kind of quirk you’d see on an individual typewriter.
Two, that purple ink is a dead giveaway that it was printed on a [spirit duplicator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_duplicator), also sometimes called a mimeograph or a ditto machine. This is the kind of machine an office would have and use to make their own copies, before a copy machine. It’s not something that a publisher or print shop would use. It’s DIY.