Imagine you are a teacher of a Church class, or chairman of some ward or stake committee, in the 1930s or ‘50s or as late as the ‘70s, and you needed a copy of some paper for everybody – maybe you were sending instructions home for your Cub Scout den’s day camp, or you wanted a line drawing of the golden plates for your Primary class to color, or you wanted your committee to make the same recipe for an elders’ quorum dinner.

Of all the possible ways of making multiple copies (expensive and slimy-papered photocopiers – decent, affordable ones didn’t become common until after 1980; inky mimeographing, which was a messy chore for only a dozen copies; spirit duplicators, if you had access to a machine; handwriting/typing as many originals as you needed, or else using carbon paper and onionskin to make three copies in one typing, thus having to type the thing only a third as many times), no method was especially practical or commonly available …

… except the hectograph. Hectographs were cheap, you could make them yourself, and they made astonishingly good copies as long as you had a steady hand and worked carefully.

A hectograph is a tray – commonly a small cookie sheet or jelly roll pan, with a 1/2-inch wall on all sides – filled with a jelly-like material. It was jelly – it was gelatin, allowed to set until it was hard. Here is a common recipe – there are other recipes that include sugar and/or white glue (Elmer’s), but this simple one works well:

1 pint glycerin
8 oz. unflavored gelatin (Knox)
2 cups water

You can buy glycerin at your local pharmacy, although they may have to special order it for you.

Dissolve the gelatin in boiling water and add the glycerin; stir until everything is clear and smooth, skimming any foam that rises to the surface. Then pour it into clean jelly roll pans, to the depth of somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 inch. (My mother always had two or three hectographs – you’ll see why in a minute.) I can’t tell you how many pans this will fill, because it depends on the size of your pans – they need to be a little bigger than the size of the paper you’re going to print on.

Set the pans on an absolutely level surface, shaking the pans a little or knocking them sharply on the table to urge any bubbles out, even poking them with a toothpick if necessary – you need the surface to be as smooth as possible. Let the gelatin set overnight.

You’ll also need hectograph pencils (still available at Amazon, many colors), or else hectograph paper (available wherever your local tattoo shop gets its supplies, believe it or not). Either use the pencils to write or draw on a sheet of ordinary paper, or else lay a sheet of hectograph paper face-down on a sheet of ordinary paper and type or draw on the top of the hectograph paper. Either way, you’ll end up with a sheet of ordinary paper with your writing/drawing on it, left by the waxy substance of the pencil or that coated the paper.

Next, dampen the surface of your hectograph very slightly, with a sponge or towel. Lay your original with its writing/drawing face down on the hectograph and smooth it out very carefully, so that every bit of the paper comes into contact with the gelatin surface. Let it sit for a time – you’ll have to determine this by experiment, but it won’t be long. Then carefully and smoothly peel the paper off the hectograph. You’ll see that your writing/drawing has been transferred to the surface of the gelatin, in mirror image.

Next lay a piece of ordinary paper on top of the hectograph, smoothing it so that it comes in full contact with the gelatin. It won’t take long for the image to transfer from the gelatin to your paper (again, you’ll have to experiment with a sheet or two to determine how long to leave it – pull up one corner of your paper to see how it’s progressing).

Carefully peel up your paper, which now is a copy of your original, in normal (non-mirror) image. Set it aside to dry while you make the next copy, and then the next. Don’t stack your copies until they are completely dry.

Depending on how much ink you allowed to transfer to the hectograph, you can make many dozens of copies, and they will be crisp and sharp.

When you’ve made all you need, you can either wipe the surface of the gelatin to clean away the ink that remains – washing away a layer of the gelatin at the same time – or you can just let the pan sit on your shelf (my mother kept hers on shelves in her fruit room in the basement). The ink will gradually sink to the bottom of the pan, leaving the surface clean for the next use. That’s why Mom had two or three hectographs – it was easy to make several at the same time, and then she usually had a fresh hectograph to use while the first one was still in self-cleaning mode.

Eventually the gelatin gets saturated with ink, so you scrape out the gelatin, wash the pan, and start over.

I hope that’s clear – it would be easy to demonstrate in a two-minute video if I did that sort of thing. There’s certainly no need to make your own copier at home these days, but several generations of Mormon teachers did it this way, by hand.