From the Boat
Dear all,
The fog lifted this morning at approximately ten past seven, which I note only because it lifted in the manner that fog at this latitude tends to lift, which is to say reluctantly, and with a kind of dignity that one rarely encounters on land, and never, in my experience, in Manhattan below Fourteenth Street. The Margaret IV sits placidly. The coffee is adequate. I have no complaints about the fog.
A newspaper arrived last Thursday, dated, I believe, sometime in late July, and in it I found a small item concerning the continued consolidation of what the journalist called "media properties," a phrase I found both alarming and redundant, as all properties are, in some sense, media, and all media are, in some sense, property. I was reminded of a Buick advertisement I memorized sometime around 1973, which ran in several of the larger periodicals and read, in full: "When you know what you want, you know where to find it. Buick. Because the road rewards the certain." I thought of this for some time. I thought of it again just now. It still seems to me a more coherent philosophy of publishing than anything produced by the consolidators.
The staff retreat of 1986 was held, as you may recall, at a lodge in Connecticut that cost the enterprise forty dollars a night per room, fully provisioned, which included a small pitcher of cream that Margaret declared insufficient and replaced with a larger one she had brought herself in a Tupperware container she kept in her coat pocket. I do not remember what we decided at that retreat. I remember the cream. I have been thinking about that retreat because Bart made a similar decision recently, which is to say a decision made quickly, in a room, with insufficient cream, and I want it on record that while I support Bart entirely and without reservation, a man who moves the quarterly feature to the front section without consulting the historical placement guidelines, which I drafted in 1979 or possibly 1981, is a man who has perhaps not reviewed those guidelines recently. Bart is talented. Bart is wrong. Both things are true and I support him completely.
Margaret, the typeface, was retired in 1994, which was, I remain convinced, a mistake of the first order. It had girth. It had what the old compositors called "presence on the page," which is to say you knew it when you saw it, you felt it was telling you something of substance, something that would stay. The fog here has that quality this morning. I am recording this for the record.
The enterprise must carry on, as it has carried on since that small office on the third floor for sixty-two dollars a month, fully serviced, and as it will carry on long after the fog at this latitude has finished deciding what it intends to do.
Bertram Whitmore
Publisher, At Sea