#xeroxlore

Faxlore, and the related xeroxlore and photocopylore, is a kind of folklore circulated via fax machine. Since many originate in office settings, they most often are jokes, art, and urban legends related to the workplace, sent and reset and degrading in visual quality. By some definitions, they are memes, in that they a individual units of meaning passed on through cultural transmission.

Unfortunately, the age of faxlore is long over by now due to the internet and the use of email to communicate. However, a variety of faxlore artifacts are preserved in a series of books by Alan Dundes and Carl R. Pagter, several of which are featured in this post:

Work Hard and You Shall Be Rewarded: Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire (1978)

When You're Up to Your Ass in Alligators: More Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire (1987)

Never Try to Teach a Pig to Sing: Still More Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire (1991)

Sometimes the Dragon Wins: Yet More Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire (1996)

Why Don't Sheep Shrink When It Rains?: A Further Collection of Photocopier Folklore (2000)

Below the read more are several examples from Work Hard and You Shall Be Rewarded that show variations of the cover image.

The Browne Popular Culture Library (BPCL), founded in 1969, is the most comprehensive archive of its kind in the United States.  Our focus and mission is to acquire and preserve research materials on American Popular Culture (post 1876) for curricular and research use. Visit our website at https://www.bgsu.edu/library/pcl.html.

It transformed the pathways through which knowledge flowed in a corporation. Before the Xerox, when an important letter arrived, only a small number of higher-ups clapped eyes on it. The original would circulate from office to office, with a “routing slip” showing who’d read it and where it should travel next. But after the photocopier arrived, employees began copying magazine articles and white papers they felt everyone else should see and circulating them with abandon. Wrote a memo? Why not send it to everyone? Copying was liberating and addicting.

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Copying also infected everyday life. Employees would sneak their own personal items on the machine, copying their IRS returns, party invitations, recipes. Chain letters began demanding participants not only forward the letter, but send out 20 copies—because, hey, now anyone could! And people quickly realized they could make paper replicas of physical objects, placing their hands—or, whipping down their pants, their rear ends—on the copier glass. This copying of objects could be put to curiously practical purposes. Instead of describing the physical contents of a perp’s pockets when jailing him, police would just dump them onto the 914’s glass and hit copy.

The bizarre welter of things being replicated made even the folks at Xerox worry they had unleashed Promethean forces. “Have we really made a contribution by making it easier to reproduce junk and nonsense?” as Sol Linowitz, CEO of Xerox International, fretted in Life magazine.

(via Xeroxlore: Folklore in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction | bavatuesdays)

The term characterizes the practice of reproducing and circulating humorous texts, folk art, and urban legends by machine rather than word of mouth and is often associated with corporate office culture. 

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