The first edition of this magazine was compiled by a teenager with a landline, a school assignment that did not exist, and a filing briefcase organised by brand and speed. It was thrown out after the HSC, mourned for three decades, and rebuilt last year as a seventy-four-page act of restoration and a public archive. That story is told in the red one, and this page will not retell it, except to note that the researcher is the same and the methods have barely changed: ring up, write down, file properly, admit what you cannot verify.

This is the sister edition. It asks the obvious question the red one left standing: what happened to everybody? The answer, enrolled over the following pages, is that nine of the great marques survived, three newcomers forced their way in, and the photocopier itself — the actual category — quietly ceased to exist somewhere around 2004. Nobody makes photocopiers now. They make multifunction devices, document solutions, workplace experience platforms. This magazine will be keeping the word PHOTOCOPIERS on the masthead regardless. Someone has to.

The rules are inherited unchanged. Every machine carries a source or an honest “unverified”. Every claim the research department could not confirm is labelled, and several of the better anecdotes in this issue nearly died of that policy. The filing system has been updated once, under protest: the 1993 cabinet filed by speed, because speed was the argument; the 2026 cabinet files by segment, because everything now runs 25 to 75 pages a minute and the argument moved to what size paper you believe in. This is covered at indecent length in the Modern Matrix.

A note on tone. It would be easy to write these pages as a eulogy — office print is a declining industry, the showrooms are gone, the brochures are PDFs, and the product photography is renders all the way down. But the machines themselves have never been better, and the industry's response to its own decline — rivals sharing factories, toner that erases itself, a hundred-page-a-minute inkjet — is more interesting than most growth markets. The red one documented a golden age. This one documents what dignity in a mature industry looks like. The research department finds it oddly moving, and asks that this not be quoted back at it.

File this one next to the red one. Same shelf. They're family.