My old files in cardboard boxes. Been in the study since I moved here. Opened one today feeling like a child at Christmas as I took out old notebooks, brittle yellow newspaper clippings. Back then, I hand copied entire pages.

By the rote act of writing they stuck more firmly in my mind than I believe they would have if I had only placed the originals on copy machines and pressed a button.

No Xerox machines then. Damned hard to imagine a world without Xerox machines even for those of us who grew up before they existed.

 
 
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