From the Boat
Dear all,
The weather at this latitude is, I will say without elaboration, precisely what weather ought to be. There is a particular quality to the light here in the late morning, a kind of golden indifference, that I have not encountered at any fixed address since the summer of 1973, when I took a room above a laundry on West 47th and wrote the first three pages of what would become the enterprise's founding charter. The barometric pressure is steady. I am warm. I say this not to boast but to report, as a publisher must.
A newspaper arrived three weeks past its date, as newspapers do, and I read in it that certain institutions are reconsidering their relationship with the printed word. I am told this is news. I considered it news in 1979, when I wrote a memo, which I believe was circulated, in which I argued that the printed word does not require an institution's endorsement to persist. The printed word is, if anything, of considerably greater girth than any institution that attempts to contain it. I clipped the article and placed it in the drawer beneath the chart table, where it will keep. These things keep.
I think often, in Augusts particularly, of the staff retreat of 1986, which was held, as I recall, at a lodge somewhere above Saratoga, possibly Vermont, and which lasted four days and produced the entirety of our editorial guidelines for entries of substance. Margaret attended, wearing the green coat. She sat at the long table and said, with the particular authority she reserved for such moments, that a word without weight is a word that will not be remembered. We ate a great deal of bread. The lodge, I believe, charged eleven dollars a night per person, fully serviced.
I have seen Bart's recent choices regarding the front-matter layout, specifically his decision to compress the etymological footnotes into a single column, and I will say that I had concerns, which I noted in a letter that I hope reached the office before the post situation became what it has apparently become. That said, Bart has been with the enterprise since 1991, which is also, not coincidentally, the last year I visited the offices, and I have found that a person who has lasted that long deserves the latitude, so to speak, to make a compression or two. I back him. I simply note my concern, as one does, from a distance.
I am reminded, in closing, of an advertisement I clipped from a magazine in 1974 or possibly 1975, for a brand of paper I no longer recall, which read: "Some things are built to last because someone decided, once, that they would." I have carried that copy in my wallet for fifty years. The paper has gone quite soft. The enterprise must carry on.
Bertram Whitmore
Publisher, At Sea