In 1937, the most sophisticated machine in the average Orlando office had no plug, no screen, and no software, just ink ribbons, four banks of keys, and a clatter like a tiny hailstorm. Selling those machines, it turns out, was a very good business.
That spring, Webster Bishop launched the company generations of locals would come to know as Bishop Office Equipment, and for the next sixty years his family outfitted Central Florida's desks, stocked its supply closets, and earned a permanent spot in the memory of anyone who ever worked an office job on this side of the state.
The company is gone now, absorbed into a corporate family tree so tangled it eventually leads to Staples. But the story of Bishop Office Equipment is a genuinely great piece of Orlando lore, complete with a son home from the war, a neon-lit golden age, a $2.65 billion plot twist, and an honest-to-goodness Florida Supreme Court case. Here's the whole thing.
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The Family Behind Bishop Office Equipment
Bishop Office Furniture Company was officially incorporated in Florida on April 28, 1937, though ask an old-timer and they'll just as likely call it Bishop Office Equipment; the company answered to both. Founder Webster Bishop picked his moment well. Orlando was a modest citrus-and-commerce town on the way up, and every business in it suddenly needed the tools of the modern office: typewriters, adding machines, carbon paper, and filing cabinets sturdy enough to survive a Florida summer without air conditioning.
Webster wasn't the only one who smelled opportunity in ink ribbons. A year later, in 1938, George Stuart opened his own office supply house downtown, and the two names went on to define Orlando's office trade for the next half century. But Bishop got there first, and that twelve-month head start let the company claim the title of Orlando's oldest office company for decades.
Sonny Bishop Comes Home from the War
Every good family business has a second act. This one began when Webster's son, William Daniel "Sonny" Bishop Sr. (1923–2020), came home from World War II and inherited the company after his father's death.
Sonny's timing was almost unfairly good. Postwar Orlando was booming, and every new bank branch, law office, insurance agency, and citrus operation needed desks, chairs, and machines to run on. Under his watch, the firm graduated from typewriter-and-adding-machine dealer to full-service office furniture and equipment house serving major Central Florida corporations. He would go on to run the company for decades, steering it through the most dramatic stretch of commercial growth the region has ever seen.
By mid-century, Bishop Office Equipment was firmly planted on East Colonial Drive, then Orlando's main east-west commercial artery and arguably its main event. This was Colonial Drive's famous "neon age," when glowing signs stacked up for miles and SR-50 functioned as the city's shopping mall before anyone had gotten around to inventing the shopping mall.
Bishop's storefront held its own in that luminous lineup, and if you worked in an Orlando office anytime between the Eisenhower and Clinton administrations, there's a decent chance your chair, your desk, or the humming machine on top of it rolled off a Bishop Office Equipment delivery truck.
The product line evolved right along with the street. Adding machines gave way to electric typewriters, typewriters to copiers and computer furniture, and carbon paper to whatever mercifully replaced carbon paper. What never changed was the model: a local family selling to local businesses, decade after decade, on reputation and a reliable delivery promise.
1800 E. Colonial Drive: The Building Locals Still Recognize
The Bishop Office Equipment flagship was a concrete block building constructed in 1959 at 1800 East Colonial Drive, at the edge of what's now the Colonialtown North neighborhood. Florida corporate records list that address as the registered office of Bishop Office Furniture Company, Inc., with Sonny Bishop Sr. named as a principal.
Concrete block was the workhorse material of postwar Florida, cheap, hurricane-stubborn, and utterly unbothered by fashion, and this particular example has proven the point by outliving nearly everything built around it.
If that address sounds familiar for a completely different reason, congratulations: you're a real Orlando local. Art supply retailer Sam Flax called the building home from 2011 until announcing its departure in March 2026, which means fifteen years of artists and designers browsed canvases and markers in the same rooms where earlier generations haggled over Selectrics and steel desks. Few of them had any idea they were shopping inside a piece of local retail history older than the Interstate.
Three Stores and a Household Name
By the 1990s, the operation had outgrown a single storefront. By 1997, Bishop operated three Central Florida stores, anchored by the flagship Bishop Office Furniture Store at 1800 E. Colonial Drive, a footprint that made it one of the region's most established office dealers, with a client roster full of large corporate accounts.
Consider what that longevity actually means. Between 1937 and 1997, Orlando reinvented itself from citrus town to space-adjacent boomtown to global tourism capital. Through every one of those costume changes, Bishop Office Equipment kept doing the delightfully unglamorous work of keeping the region's back offices humming.
The 1997 Sale That Closed a Chapter
In 1997, Sonny Bishop sold 100 percent of the company's stock to Corporate Express of the South, Inc. (CES), an Orlando-area subsidiary of the Colorado-based national office supply giant Corporate Express, Inc. The deal was exactly what it sounded like: the sale of Orlando's oldest office company. For Sonny, by then in his seventies, it closed out a run that had started when he came home from the war a half century earlier.
The purchase was one small piece of a truly enormous feeding frenzy. Corporate Express was mid-spree in one of the most aggressive acquisition runs in American business, snapping up more than 100 firms in 1996 alone and posting revenues above $3 billion by 1997. Bishop Office Equipment was one of many respected regional dealers scooped up in that wave, as national players raced to stitch together local office supply markets from coast to coast.
To its credit, CES didn't sand the name off the building overnight. It kept operating under the Bishop banner at 1800 E. Colonial Drive for about a year, a small grace period for a name that had spent six decades earning Orlando's trust.
A Merger, a Vanished Name, and a Trip to the Florida Supreme Court
Then came the paperwork. In 1998, Bishop Office Furniture Company was formally merged into its parent, CES, which merged into Corporate Express of the East, Inc. (CEE), which then renamed itself Corporate Express Office Products, Inc. Somewhere inside that Russian nesting doll of corporate filings, the independent Bishop name quietly ceased to exist. The Colonial Drive address kept running as a Corporate Express location, but the 60-year-old local brand was gone.
The story refused to end quietly, though. Two former Bishop employees, Doug Phillips and Lori Farrell, had signed non-compete agreements with the company back in 1986 and 1989, respectively. After the acquisition, they raised a fair question: could Corporate Express, a company neither of them had ever agreed to work for, enforce contracts they'd signed with a business that no longer existed?
The dispute climbed all the way to the Florida Supreme Court, which ruled in 2003 that Corporate Express could indeed enforce the agreements through the mechanics of the stock purchase and merger. Which means a mid-sized Orlando office dealer, of all things, ended up shaping Florida employment law for every stock-sale acquisition since. Not bad for a shop that started out selling typewriters.
From Corporate Express to Staples
The company that bought Bishop didn't get to stay independent for long, either. In October 1999, Dutch firm Buhrmann N.V. acquired Corporate Express for $2.3 billion. Then, in 2008, Staples, Inc. bought Corporate Express in a $2.65 billion deal, folding the entire corporate lineage of Bishop Office Equipment into the Staples empire. So yes: technically, when you grab printer paper at a Staples on East Colonial today, you're patronizing a distant descendant of the company Webster Bishop founded when Franklin Roosevelt was president. The receipts just got longer.
What's at 1800 E. Colonial Today
The building has outlasted every company that ever hung a sign on it. The 1959 concrete block structure still stands as a recognizable Colonialtown landmark, its walls wearing the colorful Mondrian-inspired murals added during the Sam Flax era. Following Sam Flax's announced exit, the property was listed for sale in early 2026 at $5.3 million through Bishop Wood Partners, a real estate firm that, in a coincidence locals can savor, happens to share the Bishop name. The universe occasionally has a sense of humor.
The site is zoned for mixed-use redevelopment and sits in one of the higher-income pockets of the urban core, in a neighborhood that has evolved far past the typewriter-and-carbon-paper world that first put Bishop Office Equipment on the map along East Colonial Drive. Whatever rises there next, whether apartments, shops, or some combination, will sit on ground with nearly ninety years of continuous commercial history underneath it.
Why Bishop Office Equipment Still Matters to Orlando
It would be easy to file this away as one more local business swallowed by consolidation, and in the narrowest sense, that's the plot. But the arc of Bishop Office Equipment traces the arc of Orlando itself: a small shop founded during the Depression, a son home from the war building it into a regional force, the neon boom years on Colonial Drive, and finally the arrival of national chains that rewired how the whole country buys everything down to its paper clips.
For longtime residents, the story comes with a satisfying kicker: the names on the sign keep changing, but the building refuses to leave. The next time those murals at 1800 East Colonial catch your eye, you'll know exactly what you're looking at, the former front door of Bishop Office Equipment, the company that furnished Orlando's offices for sixty years and, along the way, left fingerprints on Florida law, Colonial Drive lore, and this city's sense of itself.
🔥 Love Orlando history like this? Well, there's plenty more where this came from, right here.
Sources:
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/211574110/william-daniel-bishop
https://orlandomemory.org/places/george-stuart-office-supply-1938-1989/
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/obituaries/william-daniel-bishop-orlando-fl/
https://www.bizjournals.com/orlando/stories/1997/07/07/story5.html
https://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/corporate-express-inc-history/
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/fl-supreme-court/1378887.html
https://www.reuters.com/article/business/staples-wins-corporate-express-in-265-bln-deal-idUSL11414890/
https://www.orlandoweekly.com/news/orlando-area-news/art-supply-shop-sam-flax-announces-imminent-move-out-of-colonialtown-location/
https://orlandoshine.com/sam-flaxs-colonialtown-building-is-now-for-sale-at-5-3-million/
https://www.loopnet.com/Listing/1800-E-Colonial-Dr-Orlando-FL/39709548/
