# What five generations of a copier keep, and lose

> A guide page copied five times in a row loses its words to speckle and grey blocks while the diagram survives, which tells you which half a reader actually needed.

August 21, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/the-guide-photocopied-five-times

The same page, five times over. First copy crisp: a diagram, and dense grey blocks where its
paragraphs used to be. Each copy after that a little darker, a little more broken. By the fifth,
most of the page is speckled black, and the diagram is barely still a shape.

Nobody photographed the original. This is what circulated instead.

## Why does the text disappear before the diagram does?

Because a photocopier degrades fine detail first, and body text is nearly all fine detail.

A line of small type is thin strokes packed close together — serifs, counters, the gaps inside
letters like `e` and `a`. A copier reproduces contrast, not shape, and once the toner and the
glass and the light source are three or four generations removed from the original, those gaps
fill in before the eye can register them as letters. What's left is grey, roughly the density of
where the words were, and unreadable.

A diagram is thick lines on white. There's more contrast to lose before it stops being legible,
so it simply survives longer.

## So the diagram was always the part that mattered?

To whoever kept copying it, yes — the words were disposable and the picture wasn't.

Nobody chooses which parts of a page degrade; the copier does that. But somebody chose to keep
photocopying the page at all, generation after generation, and what they were preserving is
whatever was still legible when they did it. By the fifth pass the caption is gone and the
diagram is still doing its job. That's not an accident of chemistry — it's a small, unintentional
vote about which half of the page was ever load-bearing.

## Who was doing all this copying?

Nobody with a stake in it — that's the point.

A photocopier in a school office, a shop, a library, a friend's house has no publisher, no
distribution deal, no interest in quality. It reproduces exactly what's fed into it, badly, for
free, as many times as somebody's willing to queue for the machine — a distribution network with no
owner, the same one that put
[a hand-lettered screening notice](/stories/midnight-movie-flyer) on every pole in town.

## What does the fifth generation actually prove?

That the page passed through at least five pairs of hands, each one copying somebody else's copy.

A single photocopy tells you nothing about its history — it could be a first pass or a fortieth.
Five visibly distinct generations, degrading in a chain, is a paper trail: a first copier made a
copy, somebody copied that copy on a second machine, and so on. The image is evidence of its own
distribution, which a clean single copy never is.

## Can I print a page from a real strategy guide?

The page belongs to whoever drew and published it, however many generations away you found it.

A photocopy doesn't launder ownership — the diagram and the layout stay the guide's regardless of
how degraded the copy is, and a well-known one carries the game and the publisher with it.
Editorially that's a citable object; printed at scale it's a clearance question, same as any other
published artwork.

An invented page — an invented diagram, invented grey blocks standing in for invented text — keeps
the whole effect without needing anyone's permission, because the interesting thing was always the
degradation, not the specific words being degraded.

## Isn't this the same as any other guide page design?

No — a drawn guide page is about the drawing; this one is about what happened to it afterwards.

[The isometric guide page](/stories/strategy-guide-map-page) is about the draughtsmanship —
line weight, projection, a route worked out by one careful hand. This is about five machines and
what they do to a page regardless of how well it was drawn. A beautifully drawn page and a badly
drawn one degrade exactly the same way.

## Does it work for something other than a game guide?

Anything that only ever existed as a copy of a copy.

A recipe passed round a workplace kitchen. A route sheet redrawn at each handover. A set of
directions to somewhere with no street sign. The generational blur reads the same way regardless
of content: five stages of the same fight between a diagram and a machine that's slowly losing it.

## Does it print well?

Yes, and the grey blocks are doing real work — they shouldn't be smoothed into a flat tone.

Speckle and broken toner have texture, and that texture is what sells the generation count; a flat
grey rectangle reads as a redaction, not a photocopy. The diagram in the first copy wants to stay
genuinely crisp so the decline across the row has somewhere to start from.

Bone or off-white with black only. One ink carries the whole set.

## How do I get one made?

Describe the page at [JustOG](/) — how many generations, and how far the diagram should survive.
Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to
order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the [shop](/shop).

Whatever the original page said, it went the way
[a torn envelope's second ink](/stories/the-password-on-the-back-of-an-envelope) did —
carried by hand, and none the clearer for it.

Five machines later, the picture is still standing and the paragraph isn't.