Consider the Nashuatec badge, and hold on. It began as Nashua, a New Hampshire paper-and-coatings firm that entered office products in 1961 through copy paper and toner, then slid into machines under licence from Savin — Ricoh-built copiers, Nashua nameplate, for Europe and South America. In 1990 Nashua sold its copier arm to Gestetner Holdings of London, who reworked the badge as Nashuatec. An American paper mill’s name, on a Japanese engine, owned by a British duplicator dynasty. The customer noticed none of this. That was the trick.

Gestetner is the oldest name in the magazine — David Gestetner patented his Cyclostyle stylus and founded his Cyclograph Company in London in 1881, and for half a century “run it off on the Gestetner” was office English. The stencil trade paid for a collecting habit: Rex-Rotary of Denmark (1968), Nashua’s copier arm (1990). But the copiers under the Gestetner name had been Ricoh-built since the mid-1960s, and in September 1995 Ricoh simply bought the holding company — three trusted badges, filed under the initials NRG: Nashuatec, Rex-Rotary, Gestetner.

Lanier of Atlanta was the American cousin: a dictation empire (Ediphone distributors from 1934) that entered copying in 1955 selling 3M’s Thermo-Fax, and under Harris Corporation from 1983 became a billion-dollar channel moving other makers’ engines — Toshiba attested in the parts bins — through the industry’s most feared sales force. Spun off in 1999 with $700 million of debt, caught by the digital transition, its stock fell to fifty cents; Ricoh’s $3-a-share tender closed in January 2001, as this edition went to press. The lesson of all three: the money was never in the box. It was in the click, the contract, and the man who kept calling.