I consider myself lucky for having had two formative and cool jobs before careening into the advertising agency world. One was at a record store — Budget Tapes and Records (’86-’89) — followed by Kinko’s Copies (’89-’95).

(I’m ignoring the horrifying month of selling Sears maintenance agreements over the phone in between those two gigs.)

I remember wearing the blue Kinko’s apron with the deep pockets that would fill with office products during my shifts, and I occasionally look to see if any survivors ever show up on eBay/Etsy/etc. Not yet.

Last week, I was on the Wikipedia page for FedEx Office, and read the following…

Kinko’s played a significant role in the development of American counterculture in the 1980s and 1990s. In her study of the role of xerography in urban cultures in this period, the anthropologist Kate Eichhorn recounts:

“At its height of popularity between the late 1980s and mid-1990s, Kinko’s outlets in urban centres across North America were catch basins for writers, artists, anarchists, punks, insomniacs, graduate students, DIY bookmakers, zinesters, obsessive compulsive hobbyists, scam artists, people living on the street, and people just living on the edge. Whether you were promoting a new band or publishing a pamphlet on DIY gynaecology or making a fake ID for an underage friend, Kinko’s was the place to be.”

She’s not wrong.

After checking out the footnote reference, then looking for the journal the article was in and finding out it would cost $$$ to read it on an academic site, I contacted the author so see if she still had a copy of the article and she let me know that article became part of one of her books. She is a very excellent person.

Adjusted Margin: Xerography, Art, and Activism in the Late Twentieth Century by Dr. Kate Eichhorn (MIT Press, 2016)

So I bought the book. It ain’t no apron, but it’s part of my past before the Internet kicked in, and books are pretty neat too.