From the Boat
15 June, ad infinitum
Dear all,
The weather at this latitude is, as I have come to expect, entirely correct. There is a grey of such quality here that one feels the sky has been properly edited, stripped of anything superfluous, reduced to its essential argument. The Margaret IV sits in it without complaint. I have had three days of this and find myself more productive than I was in the Manhattan office, which cost sixty-two dollars a month, fully serviced, and which I gather from Bart's recent correspondence has since been converted into something involving cold-pressed beverages. Progress is relentless and does not always have the good taste to be interesting.
A newspaper arrived Tuesday aboard a supply vessel, dated, I believe, from the final week of May. The news inside it had already resolved itself in the way that news does when one reads it at sufficient remove. A merger. A vote of some kind. A photograph of a building one was not expecting to see photographed. I read the arts supplement, which was sharper, and there was a small item about an exhibition of found text that reminded me of the 1986 staff retreat in Woodstock, where Priscilla Marsh, then our deputy associate word-finder, stood at the edge of the property at some length and said she could hear the language in the trees. Nobody agreed with her at the time. I have been thinking she was correct. The retreat was held in October of that year, or possibly September of 1984. One of those.
There is a matter of Bart's recent decision to run the entry for "substantive" as a double-spread with the running head in Margaret, the typeface, at fourteen points rather than eleven. I understand the instinct. Margaret at fourteen points has a kind of formal warmth, a presence, something of considerable girth in the best sense. But the enterprise has always maintained that the word carries the spread, and the spread does not carry the word. I have written Bart a note to this effect. I expect he will do as he sees fit. He usually does, and the results are usually sound, and I have never said otherwise in any dispatch that was formally circulated.
I am reminded of an advertisement that ran in a publication I shall not name, sometime in 1971 or early 1973. "Words are the tools of civilization," it said. "Choose them as you would choose a tailor." I have not chosen a tailor since 1988 but I have always found the sentiment correct. Margaret, the first Margaret, clipped it from the magazine and kept it in the drawer beside the typewriter ribbons. I found it there in the winter of 1992 and have not moved it since. Some things earn their position by simply remaining.
The enterprise carries on, as enterprises of substance must, quietly and by post.
Bertram Whitmore
Publisher, At Sea