A. B. Dick Company

Ghost Corp Apparel — resurrecting iconic corporate ghosts.

Chicago’s A. B. Dick Company began as Albert Blake Dick’s lumber venture in 1883 and was incorporated in 1884. On June 27, 1887, it acquired rights to manufacture and sell Thomas Edison’s mimeograph: a fast, inexpensive way to turn one page into a small paper blizzard.

The company made the mimeograph a fixture of schools, offices, churches, and basement operations everywhere. Its Chicago headquarters stood at 728 West Jackson Boulevard from 1926 until 1949, when the company moved its headquarters and opened a plant in suburban Niles, Illinois.

A. B. Dick expanded from hand-cranked duplicators into offset presses, spirit duplicators, electronic typewriters, word processors, and graphic-arts equipment. Xerox-era copying changed the game, but the old mimeo machine had already done its gloriously inky damage. British General Electric acquired the company in 1979; by the late 1990s it operated as a division of Cleveland-based Nesco.

Our A. B. Dick Company collection celebrates the machines, manuals, toner-stained ambition, and heroic office hustle behind a century of making more copies than anyone asked for. In July 2004, A.B.Dick filed for Chapter 11; Presstek completed its purchase of key assets that November.