If you ever need to copy pages from an old book, you should know about drop-edge copiers.

If you ever find yourself wanting to copy pages from an old book, you should know about drop-edge copiers. These are copy machines with a raised platen glass that allow you to place one side of the book on the glass with the other side hanging over the edge. Unlike an ordinary copier, you don't have to press the spine hard against the glass in order make a page lie flat.

For my thesis work, I used some papers by Max Noether in Mathematische Annalen from the 1880s. The volumes were brittle, and I'm sure I would have cracked their spines on an ordinary copier, so I didn't make copies. Recently I learned about drop-edge copiers. I used one to copy a paper from the Transactions of the AMS from the 1930's. The Eisenhower library at the Johns Hopkins University has a drop-edge copier in a staff-only area, so I had to be a little persistent about asking about it and getting permission to use it. When I made it clear that I wanted to avoid harming these 70-year old bound journals, the staff was helpful and accommodating. Other universities have these copiers readily available, for example, UCSD.

Let me give a few personal tips about copying:

1. To make your copies easier to read (and to allow you to make better copies from your copy), set the magnification of the page as large as you can while still fitting one page on a standard sheet of paper. If the page you want to copy is smaller than a standard sheet of paper, you'll just waste space by not magnifying.
2. If part of the copy image comes out black because there is no book surface to copy in that region, fold a sheet of paper to make a strip of the right size to cover that region. This will keep your copies from having a dark strip. This saves on toner and gives you more room to write notes on your copy, and it just looks nicer.

3. If you make copies for a group of people, you can save time by making a "master" copy, and then copying from that. This has the advantage that you're pressing the book down on the copier and exposing it to hot bright light for a shorter length of time, but it means that everyone else will get a second-generation copy. Set your "master" copy to the side in case you need to make more copies later.

   A digital or scanning copier helps with this problem by allowing you to scan once and print many first-generation copies.