再Carbon paper, January 26th 2013 P51 (カーボン紙)
゛I am desperate,゛wrote Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano, a blind Italian countess, in 1808 to beau, Pellegrino Murri. He had invented a typing machine so she could write him racy letters without her maid's assistance. But she had almost run out of the inked paper it used. Carbon paper - a stalwart of office life for two centuries, the ally of dissidents and the smudger of countless fingers and clothes - now seems as antiquated as the countess's love letters. The last makers of manual typewriters, Godrej and Boyce in India, stopped production in 2009. As the keys that once imprinted up to five blurred copies fall silent, the thin films that pioneered dupliction seem destined for the bin. But not yet. New York cops occasionally use carbon paper for evidence vouchers (using $1m-worth of new typewriters bought in 2008). A firm called Swintec supplies prisons in 44 American states with around 5,000 electronic typewriters annually (made with transparent plastic to hamper smugglers). Inmates must use carbon paper：the jails like copies of all outgoing post. Jim Gordon of Form-Mate, Canada's last carbonpaper maker, recalls prisons ゛desperate゛appeals after other suppliers went bust. Survivors scoop up business as rivals go bankrupt. But they agree that trade is ailing. ゛I will die with it,゛says Miles Murphy of York Haven, Britain's last manufacturer, who is ゛staggered゛that demand has lasted so long. From an annual 10,000 .tonnes a year for Britain in 1990, he says, his output now struggles to reach 15 tonnes. Many Western makers have sold their old machinery to India：still a big market but a tough one thanks to tariff and local competition. Yudhviram Solanki, head of K Jumbo in Mumbai, says, he is one of around 200 producers in India. His sales are growing by 5-10% a year. Typewriters have largely gone；but, he says, ゛business forms are everywhere.゛As with his Western counterparts, the big money is now in huge rolls of one-time carbon paper for purchase orders and invoices. Officialdom, banks and small firms are the best customers. In Britain Barclays, a bank, still provides carbon paper in its customers' business deposit books；and a few fogeyish Post Office branches use it for some receipts (for passports, for example). But other uses are odder still. Pigeon fanciers use it to log racing times in specially designed clocks. A blue, film-coated version checks the height of dental fillings；a heavy-duty black sort helps guide stonemasons' chisels. Mr Murphy sells 40,000 sheets of red carbon paper every year to potters：it transfers drawings onto clay (when fired, the pigments vanish). But tattoo artists may be the most indelible customers. Frith Street Tattoo, a punky London parlour, says it uses 400 sheets of black carbon paper a month. Its artists copy patterns and messages of love and loyalty to transfer paper, which leaves a carbon trace when moistened and pressed to the skin. Intimate printing has a long history.
