From the Boat
1 July, ad infinitum
Dear all,
The weather at this latitude is, as it has been since we rounded the point on Thursday, precisely the kind of weather that reminds a man why he bought a boat in the first place. Clear, indifferent, and entirely without opinion. I mention this only because the newspaper that arrived in the last provisioning, dated the eleventh of June and somewhat softened at its edges, carried a report about temperatures in the city that I found frankly exhausting to read. The city suffers. The Margaret IV does not. I have folded the offending page into a shape I believe is called a boat by children, and sent it back in the approximate direction from which it came.
The newspaper also contained, buried near the listings, a small notice about the rising cost of office space in Midtown, which brought to mind, as such things do, the sixty-two dollars a month we paid for the original enterprise offices on West Forty-Fourth. Fully serviced. A telephone, a shared corridor, and a woman named Mrs. Pelletier who brought a cart of things past the door at half past ten. Coffee, I believe, and something wrapped in paper. I do not remember anyone complaining. I mention this not as nostalgia, which is a weakness, but as data.
The 1986 staff retreat in, I believe, Saratoga Springs, though it may have been Brattleboro, produced among its several useful outcomes a maxim I attributed at the time to myself and have seen no reason to revise. We had gathered around what passed for a conference table, which was in fact two card tables and a sheet of plywood, and someone, possibly Gerald, read aloud from a brochure for a magazine then advertising heavily in print. The copy read, and I have this exactly: "For the man who knows what he wants before he knows he wants it." We laughed, and then we did not laugh, because it was, in fact, a reasonable mission statement. We printed it on nothing. We should perhaps have printed it on something.
I understand Bart has seen fit to move the Of Substance column to the back third of the issue. I will say plainly that I disagree with this placement, as I disagreed with it when I wrote to him in, I believe, April, or possibly late March. The back third is where things go to be found by the committed reader only, and while I admire the committed reader as a category, the Of Substance column deserves also the casual one. That said. Bart knows the readership as it exists now, and I know it as it was, and between those two knowledges the enterprise presumably finds its footing. I back him. I note my objection. I back him.
Margaret, in her final year, said that a publication without a point of view was simply paper with ambitions. I think of this often. The typeface she preferred, which we retired in 1993 and which I have petitioned, in writing, to restore on three separate occasions, had a girth to it that made every word appear to mean slightly more than it did. That was not a flaw. That was the work.
The enterprise must carry on.
Bertram Whitmore
Publisher, At Sea